by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m EXTREMELY self-conscious any time I find myself writing a female character, doubly so when I have to think up what I imagine women say when they’re alone (say, in the bathroom) and are talking about men.
It’s a situation fraught with the potential for disaster. I just can’t win. How do I know what women say in such a private situation? I’ve never been there and it would never happen even if I was there because, well, I’m a man. So, I have to use my imagination. (Duh.)
The only solution to this insecurity, as best I can tell, is to be really, really self-conscious about it and also very conservative about any assumptions I might make. I can’t have an agenda. I strictly stay within what I can maybe reverse engineer from what I know about women (what little I know) and then have in the front of my mind, “WHAT WOULD OLIVIA WILDE AND JESSICA CHESTAIN THINK OF THIS TEXT.”
That’s all I got. That’s the only way I can think of to not have women tittering on Twitter about how a doofus, clueless man AGAIN didn’t write female characters well.
