Fist bump to all the on-line friends I talked to in person, and to the new friends I made. You're all awesome. I loved reconnecting with friends I met at the LDStorymakers Conference as well.
I LEARNED SOMETHING AWESOME TODAY! Something I can definitely use in my novel writing, and I'm surprised I haven't clued into this before: Males and females TALK about DIFFERENT kinds of STUFF!
Yes, I know! It's rather uncanny. Here's how I gained this epiphany:
I grew up with tons of sisters, and 2 brothers. My brothers talked about, I really don't know, I never really paid attention. They were always in the basement or in their "hut" working with boxes and toilet paper rolls along with mud and concoctions of something called, STUFF.
The only time we girls paid attention to them was when something of ours went missing, like our Barbie car, or hair brushes, nail polish or other items we referred to as girl treasures.
IF we discovered the boys had taken, or even touched our girly treasures, we would punish them. We punished them hard and then we took proof. We made them sit for a makeup and hair makeover. See the proof? Isn't he cute. After this picture we nicknamed him Sassafras.
I'm now a mother of two girls and a boy, who is my youngest. He corners me with questions about dropping him and his buddies off in the mountains to camp (they are all 14 and 15 yrs old) or if he loaded up the trailer with all the motorcycles could I take them riding. And I generally tell him to go ask his dad.
For months his comments and questions have continued until I finally asked him why he always came to me with these questions instead of his father. He just stared at me, speechless. That's the moment I had my epiphany.
What did I expect him to ask and talk to me about? Questions about going to get a pedicure and a new pair of shoes? Or, Mom, guess who I like? Or, comments on how his friends and him all like the same girl, but he liked her first? And, do you know why he doesn't say these things? Because he speaks testosterone.
He's a young man now. I should have recognized this by the fact that he's taller than me and his voice has gotten rather low and irritating. In fact, his sister came home this last weekend from college and told him to not talk until his voice gets normal again. I remembered my poor brothers who grew up surrounded by volcanoes of estrogen. I can't even recall conversations we had other than, "Give that back or else" and many other lame threats.
This epiphany caused me to rethink how I have written my male protagonists and male characters, how they relate to others, and how their conversations sound. When writing we need to make sure to write conversations that are real and true to each character, whether male or female. If not, we won't have believable characters and we wouldn't want to disappoint future readers.
Many of the blogs that I follow have in depth information about writing believable characters. Please check them out, they are in my right sidebar.
I'm just getting ready to wrap up this post and my son just walked in. He's saying, "Mom! Do you think I'm gonna need stitches?"
Great...
