writingmastery wrote this wonderful list of 20 things the want more of in fictional male characters. And yes, we know fiction is oversaturated with male characters, but is there really enough representation and diversity in these characters? Give us different men!
Here is the Cliche Male Character Quiz and here is the Male Protagonist Bingo:
What would you like to see more of in male characters? Let us know in the comments below!
Then write your own story with heroes the way you want them to be. Simple.
Right, because that’ll fix the entire publishing industry.
They publish what people want to read. I write beta males – readers don’t want that so I’ve not had luck breaking into the big 5. That’s not the fault of the industry. Supply and demand. If they bought more books with beta males would readers buy them? IDK. But it’s the same reason stores carry the vast majority of their clothes in sizes 6-12 because that is what most people will buy.
And you can say what you want about the quality of my writing but I’ve won national contests and international contests in contemporary romance and romantic suspense with top 5 editors as judges.
The bingo sounds like a lot of real life serial killers/murderers I’ve read about.
Another suggestion. Can we have a few male characters who don’t have terse, tough sounding names? Every single hero seems to be called Colt, Steel, Dirk, Hunter, or something like that.
Just once, I’d love to see someone come in, beat the crap out of a dozen minons, and say, “If your boss wants to talk, tell him that Clarence Wimbledon Figglesworth III stopped by.”
Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar books have precisely that character: Windsor Thorne Lockwood III, who now has his own (very good) book: “Win” (the Bolitar series gets a bit repetitive after a while)
I’m happy to say that, despite most of my male characters having *some* of the ‘troublesome traits’, most of them are nuanced enough to not really fall under the ‘typical male characters’. Brehl is bi-racial, discovers that he can shapeshift in an emergency, but his ‘alternate form’ is that of a stag, not a fighter, indeed, he tells a Sacred Sword that he is ‘not a predator’. Rhiann of Ollahm loses his left foot just above the ankle early on in my stories, and becomes a voice of wisdom and compassion as the head of the Ollahmic temple in Sharlan. Qedel, son of Sacred Sword Redel Calasti, is born aphonic, and, while he eventually gains an alternate method to speak (using crystals), it really does not overcome the natural traits he ended up with through living with his muteness (he is also a craftsman, one who creates essentially very fanciful windchimes, as well as a few other musical instruments). While his own adopted son, Khol’vehk, starts out seeming brooding, you end up seeing that Khol’vehk has an enormous amount of vulnerability, and is conscious of the dangers of being seen as strong. As for perhaps my two ‘forever angsty teen’ attitude characters (though, as of the most recent stories, Maskar is around 150, and Delph another two decades beyond that–they’re both from a long-lived race), both have a lot of nuance to their attitudes. They might be snappy, and Maskar is well known for his humor, but they are also far more complicated than just their temperament and tragic backstories. Delph is a healer, and, indeed, goes to the most unpleasant and potentially dangerous position he can have, as a way to get away from the mother who he felt never loved him. Maskar, while the most powerful resonant magician in this age, is also someone who often will unexpectedly show his own vulnerability, the experiences he’d had, even when dealing with someone antagonistic to him. He’s also very decidedly a pacifist. Then there are Kialor and Sihan’el. Kialor is a healer, later priest of Lady Night, and very much a voice of wisdom, rather than a voice of power. Sihan’el, trained as an assassin, and later serving the god of destruction as one of his Chosen, still is very much a family man, and is extremely protective of his illegitimate children. So, yes, I do my darnedest to write about more complicated characters, not ‘typical ones’.
I confess that Sir Gawain in my “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Ham” (a modern riff on the Medieval poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, in Seussian anapests) has lots of armour, but come on, he’s a knight! I do make fun of the tradition of long loving descriptions of arms and armour, though.
More stars like Jimmy Stewart then. Jimmy Stewart is funny, has wide range of emotions, wasn’t supernatural at all, was often physically weak (in Rear Window in particular the suspense is that he can’t physically defend himself but only watch others and think.) He may not have a direct involvement in a homosexual relationship, but Rope is well-known as the defining film of the hidden homosexual fantasy. He has tears in his eyes in the finale of Vertigo, as he cries ”You shouldn’t have been… you shouldn’t have been that sentimental”, double-taking on himself, realising that it is himself who has lost control of his feelings, not his lover. He is not in any way fit to be described as an anti-hero, he is pretty non-gray in most respects. He’s a slender, normal phsiqued man with no olympic stature. He has a physical disability (although in 1. you say a person ought not to be based on ‘disorders’) which makes him retire from the police force in Vertigo, and is on a pension.
In ”the man who shot liberty valance”, he is directly contrasted as the weaker, more law-abiding man who prefers reading books, in comparison with John Wayne, and is only portrayed as a strong man by the legend that the newspapers print, which is an exaggeration of his manhood printed by media, when he’s actually very weak.
I think that’s part of what gave him a wide appeal to his audiences in the height of the 40s and 50s era of male heroes in Westerns and crime films, Hitchcock and John Wayne both used that to their advantage.
1st year student who never wrote anything gives these huge lists what to write about. Sure bro.