On Capturing Women (Part 1)
Much has been written on the internet since internet time immemorial about how to ‘get girls’—pickup artist stuff and whatnot. I’ve never seen anything on how to capture women, though—and no, I don’t mean kidnapping them. What I mean is how to capture them on the page, or the canvas, or the silver screen. As a man who is able to do that well, I’ve found that, beyond it just helping my characters ‘feel real’, women in life feel more comfortable around me, and in opening up to me. They feel like I’ll actually ‘get’ them, understand them without any undue judgement, which is a vastly more important and healthy dynamic to have with them throughout life than the mere party trick ability of convincing them through key phrases at a loud bar to give you the time of day.
The first step to depicting women well is for that to wholly be your goal, with no ulterior motive, much as you should learn to skateboard because you actually want to skateboard, not because you want to ‘look cool’. Though women may like your work, and like how they feel around you, and thus want to know you, that’s a mere side effect and not anything you should be doing all of this for. Plus, it’s not necessarily anything you should ‘do something about’ when it does occur—taking advantage of that dynamic for personal gain is poor form as a human being. If you, as someone they trust, let them down through your behavior or actions towards them, that’s liable to disappoint them more than if you were just some random asshole they thought nothing of. With great connection comes great responsibility—be here to do great art and have great bonds with others.
When it comes to actual artistic work you are doing—let’s say, writing—what you have to remember is that you are a woman. I don’t mean that in any sort of gender identity way—I mean that the Venn diagram overlap is pretty fucking vast between a man and a woman. It’s kind of like how the DNA similarity between pigs and humans is 98%—us men who are pigs are at least 98% like women. No matter how manly you might feel as a man, you have thoughts near constantly that women have had or would have, and you’ve certainly said countless things they’ve said too. So, anyone who says they can’t write convincing dialogue for women is lying to themselves—put the word ‘Hello’ down in quotes on paper and bam, you’ve just written your first convincing line for a woman to say. It’s really that easy, as the ‘woman’ you are creating is a hallucination in the mind of the reader, anyway. So long as you don’t do anything to snap them out of the trance-like state they’re in while imbibing the art, they will ‘stay under’. A woman you write is convincingly a woman until proven otherwise—the ball stays in the air unless it is dropped. Even a woman saying something like “my balls itch” isn’t necessarily going to take audiences out of what you’ve created—in fact, that could be the line that solidifies that the woman you’ve crafted speaks in an ironic, slangy, not-giving-a-fuck way—it could be the key to showing us her character.
In my film NO SHARK, which you can watch for free on YouTube in all of its 1 hour 50 minute glory, a lot of the main character’s inner monologue is her saying things that a man could certainly say too—she even very specifically ogles the women around her, and fantasizes about them. We’re hearing a woman’s voice though, and we’re looking at the woman who is ostensibly thinking these thoughts, and the audience is under a spell from that, as well as from the fact that there’s depth to the thoughts themselves. When a woman complains that a female character is ‘unconvincing’, what they really mean is the thoughts and motivations have no depth—they’re unexplored by the writer, leaving nothing there for the reader or viewer to sink their teeth into. There is no such thing as ‘male depth’ or ‘female depth’—there is only depth, period. Create depth and the woman you are creating will create itself in their mind. Like with the art form of magic, the magic occurs more within the spectator, and in the assumptions you have caused them to make, than it does in front of their eyes.
As far as writing the actions of women—what they might do in a given situation, or when faced with certain challenges—that too is of course universal. Women and men both do the right thing, and the wrong thing, and everything grey in between. The only time you can fuck over the believability of that is if you fall back on them doing things that are distinctly ‘woman’ to do in a hackneyed way. Women writers fall into this same trap—there are plenty of romantic comedies written by both men and women which rinse and repeat the same trope of the ‘sassy friend’ the woman goes to for advice, etcetera. If you have the female character do something we haven’t seen done a thousand times before, that in and of itself will seem realistic. Noticing what Hollywood has done to death, and doing the opposite, is a good general rule not just for this, but for most artistic decisions in life.
The net result of creating in this way will be words you can be proud of, and which women can be unashamed to enjoy. There are plenty of works by actual women which women don’t want to admit they like—they know it’s fucking garbage, but they like some aspect of it anyway. You don’t want to be that in their lives—you want to be something more. If they’re shy to admit they like your stuff publicly, you want it to be not because your work is corny but because it’s deeply personal to them. They won’t necessarily proclaim from the rooftops that they love your work and respect you as a writer of women—the proof might simply be in the pudding of how they talk to you and connect with you. I’ve had plenty of women reach out to me privately, quietly saying how much they related to RAMEKIN, or NO SHARK. When you capture something rare and beautiful about being a woman—through the mere writing of works, and characters, of undeniable depth—that is not easily forgotten.
Tomorrow I will discuss the aspect of capturing women that is working with them directly—shooting them, directing them, etcetera. In the meantime, you can show your love and adoration of me and these Substacks by contributing to KILL THE LION FILMS, my film studio, at $2 per month! Thank you for reading.