For these reasons I think Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series is more counterexample or nuance to the view advocated in your post, so that we may appreciate that sometimes circumstances can determine characters more strongly than an unbiased portrayal demands they be determined.

“I think of a woman, and then I take away reason and accountability.”

Heh, but seriously now, people are people. Just that some have some different concerns than other ones.

Wellllll, that one’s complicated. First of all, the way rape gets used for female characters is really problematic — this is off-topic, so I won’t go into detail here, but it starts with the fact that male characters can have all kinds of trauma, but women in fiction are extremely likely (relatively speaking) to be rape victims.

More to the point of characterization — even if she doesn’t dwell on it or talk about it, that experience will still shape her behavior in lots of unspoken ways. If it doesn’t, then that’s one of the other problems with rape in fiction, which is that the consequences don’t get represented accurately.

I haven’t read the story, obviously, so I have no idea how you handled it. But if I can temporarily interrupt my own thread for a PSA: if you’re going to put that trope into a story, please please *please* do your research. Talk to rape counselors, find out how different kinds of people react, make sure you do justice to the crime (as it were).

(Sorry if that came off as lecturing, Scott — I don’t mean it to be. More taking the chance to say these things so anybody else reading the thread can think about them.)

The only area I shied away from was writing her reactions to a rape she suffered in a previous book. I agonised about how to approach it. I felt that anything I tried to write would feel false and glib. But again, when I came to approach that section I immediately realised, while typing, that I didn’t need to address it at all – because her character as I’d established it was such that she wouldn’t dwell on it, and certainly wouldn’t write about it. So I’d unwittingly let myself off the hook, kind off.

But that aside, it seems to me that person first, role second, gender third is exactly the way to approach writing a character of opposite gender to yourself, be you male or female.

I’ve just finished a novella with a femal protagonist and didn’t actively set out to write ‘a woman’. I hope, instead, to have created an interesting character.

I hear you, but I stand by my original point. Number of capillaries isn’t likely to affect characterization, and I have yet to hear of a behavioral difference that isn’t complicated by a bunch of exceptions and caveats, to the point where I’m dubious of the value of using it as a starting point. If you approach it as a matter of “here’s the average, and here’s how my character deviates from it,” that strikes me as likely to produce the kind of characterization that bothers me: female characters treated *as* deviations from the norm. “Oh, she’s tough and aggressive for a woman,” or (to flip it around) “he’s awfully caring and nice, for a man,” or something else in that vein.

I honestly believe that writers who start off by thinking about how the character was raised, and in what kind of society, will generally get better results than the ones who start with a notion of biological absolutes.