Wow – what an interesting thread! Substantive ideas about the creative process, and I get to find out all kinds of interesting tidbits about my fellow Downers!
It didn’t even really occur to me until I started reading through these posts that I only ever – in the Downs – have written male characters. So far I’ve changed race (one Hobbit, two Men, an Elf and a Dwarf) and the characters have all been fairly different from one another, but I’ve not yet crossed genders (unless Balrogs have gender, in which case I might have been a female for the birthday party. . .) I’m honestly not sure why I have done this, since the only things I’ve attempted to write in the ‘real world’ (having begun and then abandoned two novels, and finished only one short novel) have had women as the protagonists. I did not really feel any difficulty in ‘writing’ women in those works, but in this forum I feel the need to inhabit the male mind.
I suspect that it’s perhaps the interactive nature of the Downs. In my own (thankfully abandoned) novels, I had total control of the reality, and thus there were no surprises. But here there are lots of surprises, and I find it more like acting than writing – I have to ask myself frequently, “How would I react to this incident” and then work through from that to “How will my character react to that?” It’s probably a lot easier for me to get from A to B without having to contend with the gender line.
But his raises a disturbing notion I’d not considered either (am I really this naďve? Yes, I’m afraid so) – the characters I’ve created in the Downs have without exception been rather flawed people; people whom, quite frankly, I like reading and writing about but would never want to spend time with. If these are characters that I can easily project myself into (or project out of me). . .yipes!!
Hmmmmm. . .anybody got a comfortable couch I could lie on as I write in this place. . .