Inside the Mind of the Male Character

Inside the Mind of the Male Character

A Guest Post by Author Brian McBride

The week that I set out to write this blog post, I went bowling with my family for my brother’s birthday. It’s easily been ten years since I’ve visited a bowling alley, and I quickly realized that they are not the family they once were. The introverts that we are, we were excited when we first walked into the bowling alley and saw lanes 1-40 completely empty. Surely, the staff would pick one at random. But as the staff member led us past all the empty lanes to the very last lane—number 50—our hopes were dashed. To make matters worse, our neighbors to the immediate left were a pair of forty-something, single guys who appeared they were already two drinks into their game.

Fortunately, my family can have fun in any situation. Including but not limited to being surrounded by some of the filthiest mouths I’ve been around in a long time. Still, we played our game and had a blast, doing our best to tune out the crass jokes and the drunken brawling over the course of the next two hours. As the night wore on, however, my irritation with these two men turned to pity and even sadness. Did they have wives or girlfriends waiting for them to come home? Did they have children who looked to them to lead the way? What were their childhoods like? Did they have fathers who modeled positive masculinity, or where they neglected or even abused? As someone who grew up with several positive examples of Godly manhood, it was glaringly obvious to me that there was something missing in their lives—and they’re not the only ones. Truthfully, there is a great absence of positive masculinity in contemporary culture.

When I shared this story with a friend the next day, I made the statement: “We need men again.” I believe the same could be said of fiction. As an author, my mission statement—and you’ll find it in my books and on my website—is that “there is power in story.” It cannot be overstated how important it is for fiction to depict positive role models for both men and women, and the power that these role models can have in our lives when we read their stories.

Yes, we need men in our culture who haven’t become the stereotypes they’ve been fed. Due to a crisis of fatherlessness and the absence of positive male role models, men have been treated and portrayed as dumb and brainless, obsessed with sex, physical strength their defining characteristic, and emotionally stunted. That’s why I firmly believe it is so important to evaluate how we write the men in our stories. Because when we are given positive male characters, they are so often unrealistic to the point of being unrelatable and, for the average male reader, unattainable. 

In a profession that is dominated by female artists, the examples we have of male literary heroes in modern, popular fiction are unrealistic at best and problematic at worst. This is for the simple reason that the way women see things and the way men see things are often very different, and so when we write characters of the opposite gender, it’s important that we understand what makes men and women psychologically distinct and beautifully unique. More on that later.

Now, as a man, I’m not going to pretend to be any sort of expert at writing female characters. I do my best, learning from the stories I read—since they are mostly written by women—and learning from the women in my life. But what I can do is provide insight into how you, as writers, can craft male characters who resonate with the male members of your audience. To get inside the mind of a male character, we first need to understand the attributes that are inherent to men and how these attributes are either promoted or prevented.

INHERENT TRAITS

To be clear, no man’s mind works the same. Life experiences will absolutely influence the psychology of a male character and who they become, which we’ll get to in a moment. But let’s highlight some inherent male attributes:

• Assertive
• Independent
• Self-reliant
• Risk-taking
• Competitive
• Focused on achievement
• Leadership tendencies
• Stoic
• Prefers direct communication 

It’s important to understand that, while these are common and identifiable traits inherent to men, and thus male characters, there is room for nuance. Not all men exhibit all of these traits to the same degree, and there are women who, of course, exhibit some of these traits to some degree. But this is a fantastic starting point for us as authors when crafting male characters; we can look at these traits and ask, “How will my character’s journey in this story either promoteor prevent these inherent traits?”

EXTERNAL INFLUENCES

A male character who has been belittled and abused isn’t likely to be assertive. A male character who is disabled isn’t likely independent and self-reliant. A male character who constantly loses to his betters isn’t likely to be competitive. A male character who is raised by women with little-to-no positive male influence isn’t likely to be stoic and is more inclined toward emotional expression. 

When we first understand the foundational attributes of the male character’s mind, we can begin to craft backstories and character arcs that produce change in this character’s life in spectacular ways. Much of storytelling is about how outside forces affect our hero’s journey, and when we understand where our hero begins and the external influences that brought him to that point, we can more realistically bring him to a satisfying end.

A male character who begins as competitive and proud, assertive and stubborn, stoic and emotionally distant, independent and selfish, may by the end of your story become humble, gentle, empathetic, and selfless. Not at the cost of realistic masculinity—not by removing what makes him a man and replacing his inherent attributes with inherently feminine attributes—but by framing his newfound character traits in a way that honors what makes him a man.

THE DANGER OF THE IDEAL MAN

Because storytelling is all about nuance and about pitting characters who are total opposites against one another, and even about emphasizing good versus evil, we often find two kinds of male archetypes: the Flawed Man and the Ideal Man. An example of this can be found in Tolkien’s works. Through Aragorn, we find the Ideal Man and through Boromir we find the Flawed Man. Neither of these archetypes is wrong and they can, in fact, be powerful in their way. What we’ve seen in modern, traditional storytelling, however, has been a further polarization of these two archetypes, flinging them into absurd unrelatability and unattainability.

The world of traditional publishing is dominated by romance stories like Outlander, Bridgerton, Fifty Shades of Gray, and the entire catalogues of Danielle Steele and Colleen Hoover, but none of these contain truly realistic depictions of men. The reason being that when women write men—often in romance—they tend to write the Ideal Man. A daydream. A fantasy.  Sometimes this is deliberate for the sake of the story, but other times this is subconscious—particularly in escapist genres like fantasy where, as writers, we are attempting to craft new worlds and systems that feel beautiful and grand and ideal. We want heroes and we want villains, but the truth is that most male characters will fall somewhere in between; when we choose to lean into that in-between—the fact that a man in his inherent self-reliance can be both capably strong and unwittingly selfish all at the same time—we find opportunity for powerful storytelling.

The easiest way to make your male character fall flat is to fling him too far into one of these polar-opposite archetypes: Flawed or Ideal. If a male character is to be either Flawed or Ideal, he must be written in such a way that is rooted in his inherent traits as a man. (A caveat: a character’s maleness is not always central to the story, and that is okay. Sauron is a male character, but his maleness was not essential to the story. Tolkien was not concerned with whether Sauron was depicted as a “realistic male character” but rather with making Sauron evil. If written differently, Sauron could have easily been made a female. Tolkien’s choices make sense for his story, but in stories, like romance, where characters’ femininity and masculinity are central to the storyline, it is important to evaluate how they are depicted.)

The danger with the Ideal Man, in any story where his role as a man is central, is that he perpetuates stereotypes that may cause harm to the average male reader or set unrealistic expectations for the average female reader. The Ideal Man is strong and never weak. He has a flawless, cover-worthy physique. He waxes poetic on a whim. If he has flaws, they are shallow and surface-level. (e.g. He is aloof for no reason). He is overly confident and never second-guesses himself. 

The bottom line is this: if we are to create a realistic male character, we must close the gap between the Flawed Man and the Ideal Man. Somewhere in between is a male character we can relate to.

THROUGH RESISTANCE

Now, I understand that most of you reading this are likely coming from a Christian point-of-view and so you’re not writing the “smut” that dominates mainstream fiction, and that’s great! But maybe you’d be surprised to see how some of these Ideal Man characteristics have maneuvered their way into your own writing. Perhaps as Christians, we are even more prone to this. Generally speaking, young Christian women who aren’t married spend a good deal of time praying for and dreaming of their future spouse, and perhaps they have formed an ideal of what a future husband should be. That ideal isn’t necessarily wrong, but—and we all must do this when pursuing romantic relationships—perhaps it is unrealistic to the point of being unattainable.

Should women seek a man who prays, and should men be men who pray? Absolutely. Should women seek a man who works hard, and should men strive to be hard workers? Absolutely. But this is something that we, in real life, grow toward and strive toward—it is not something that happens by default. It is either promoted or prevented. So, in fiction, when we see male characters who are depicted as the Ideal without being allowed to understand how these traits werepromoted and what they had to overcome to become this person, it comes off as unrealistic and unattainable, and this can actually be harmful to the male psyche by leading them to believe that, since they are so deeply flawed, they are undesirable, unwanted, unseen, and worthless.

Believe it or not, a male character who is flawed and fails will resonate more with male readers than the Ideal Man. Why? Because many men often feel deeply flawed in some way or another. This doesn’t mean we swing so far to the other end of the spectrum as to depict only men who are deeply flawed, however. I believe Frodo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings provides a good example of this. Throughout his journey to destroy the One Ring, Frodo bears the weight of the Ring and the gravity of his responsibility to see it destroyed. At times, he fails to resist the pull of the Ring, because he is only a man (well, Hobbit). But in Frodo, we see that because he has personally carried the Ring’s weight, he understands all the more the urgent need to see it destroyed. And so, as the films go on, the Ring tries less and less to seduce Frodo to wield its power while continuing to try to seduce those around Frodo. Frodo is, at once, an example of a man’s fragile strength juxtaposed with his sheer determination and force of will. Truly, only Frodo could have destroyed the One Ring.

So, how do we write realistic male characters? We don’t want to oversell their strengths, but we also don’t want to make them unlikably weak. That brings us back to understanding what makes men and women psychologically unique and distinct from one another. When you read that, you probably made a few assumptions—like “women are emotional creatures” or “men are visual creatures” and maybe you have biases based upon poor experiences in the past. While these stereotypes may carry some truth to them, it’s actually a lot more nuanced than that. When we fail to recognize and work within the nuances of male stereotypes—that place that exists between the Flawed Man and the Ideal Man—the result is an unrelatable, unrealistic male character.

An article published to the National Library of Medicine, entitled “Understanding Female and Male Insights in Psychology: Who Thinks What?” it says this: “A male becomes wise and mature through resistance and good guidance, whereas a female becomes matured and wise through least resistance and good guidance.”

As writers, our primary goal when crafting any character is their development. Whether it is a hero arc or a villain arc or somewhere in between, the character we end up with in the finale should always differ vastly from the character we began with in the opening scenes. But the inner journey a male character takes needs to differ from the inner journey a female character takes. A male character will grow and mature through resistance while a female character will grow and mature through least resistance. 

Storytelling is about our characters and how they respond to resistance. It’s about hurdles and obstacles, plot twists and road-blocks. Understanding the difference in how a male character will naturally respond to these things versus a female character is pivotal to writing realistic male characters. This doesn’t mean female characters don’t face resistance, but it does mean they will respond to it from a different place in their inner life.

I won’t pretend to have the perfect understanding of how to write realistic male/female characters, but my hope is that, if nothing else, everything I’ve written here has provided plenty of food for thought. Honestly, these lessons aren’t just vital to good storytelling, but to healthy communication in general. When we, as men and women, learn to better understand one another, we can better communicate with one another. The same goes for the stories we tell and the way we tell them.