I'm a man. Working on my sci-fi novel. It's meant to be a light-hearted heist caper. My main character is a woman. She's a strong and sassy character based on the women in my life, and the story follows all the rules about writing strong female characters. There are no men to save her, and the antagonist in the story is another woman who is her exact opposite.
However because the character swears, makes pop culture references and sexually objectifies men, some critics have commented that this makes it seem that it's a female character being written by a man.
I'm sure I'm not the only person who has gotten this criticism. Any ideas on how to fix this?
Answer
TL;DR: Try submitting with a female pen name. If the criticism goes away, there's your answer.
This is your character and you need not bow to anybody's tropes or nuances, or notions of how or why a female is. Justify your character's actions, outlook, language, interests with sources from within your character. Formative influences from youth and later on have their place, but those go into the character, not onto the page as such. As a reader, I do not so much care what happened to your character EXCEPT as far as it helps me to understand her.
So your character herself is the seat of anything she does, and your job as the author is to selectively show the reader what makes your character tick. I dated a girl who was a sysad on a university VAX system, she ran cross-country, she climbed mountains (for fun! -- ugh!), and she knew all about the music scene, criticized movies from a logic and plot point of view, and so forth. She was all woman, too.
Make your character live! Write her in your chosen voice, and keep working on things that you agree need working on. Don't take any "you write this female like a man would" criticism unless you can source it from a blind test.
In my own creative writing classes (long ago), we had a great demonstration of the frailty of most peoples' sense of the sex of the writer through anonymous submissions. It was revealing.
Finally, even when I do think that I can tell that an author is a man or a woman, it doesn't so much come across in the way the characters stick to sex-based roles, but in the overall writing. Yet only rarely do I get a chance to really blind test this, so YMMV.
You know your character better than anybody. Make this character work on her own ground, for who she is, and keep in mind that even the most perfect author (me., no doubt) still has to lump some criticism. Write to please a committee, and your voice will not be heard.
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