Female authors are often cautioned to create authentic male characters. Characters that not only look like men, but behave and talk like them, too. I totally agree with this premise. After all, we want our characters to be both believable and distinct enough so that, even without speech tags, readers can distinguish one character from another just through dialogue.

However, I don’t believe that a male character fails to be authentic if he’s informed about women’s fashion, knows what color magenta is, or uses words like “lush” or “chest” instead of “tits,” “boobs,” or (please, no) “knockers.” Along the same lines, I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that men, even alpha men, don’t know the difference between cotton and silk, or a chignon and a French twist.

Detective Dane Hollister, Linda Howard’s sexy, alpha detective hero in “Dream Man,” is an example. This is what he thinks when he meets the heroine:

“There was something vaguely intriguing about her, something that kept him looking at her. She wasn’t a beauty, though she was even-featured and certainly not hard on the eyes, but she sure didn’t do anything to attract attention….She had nice, clean-looking dark hair, but it had been pulled back into one of those severe French twists….A little slimmer than he liked, about a hundred and twenty pounds; he preferred a woman to be soft rather than bony….Her hands were tightly clenched in her lap. He found himself watching them: slim, fine-boned hands, free of any jewelry….”

Dane uses adjectives and nouns to describe the heroine that don’t fit within traditional notions of “man speak”: intriguing, even-featured, French twist, slim (twice), fine-boned. Granted, he uses the word “clean-looking” instead of silky, but this seems more masculine to me only in its contrast to the other words. It doesn’t make the other words overly un-masculine.

I love Dane’s character. I like male characters who use words like lush or luscious. Do I hear many men use the word? Nope. I don’t hear many of them use the words slim or fine-boned or French twist, either. Doesn’t mean they don’t think them. And it doesn’t mean my male characters are wimps for thinking or saying them, so long as I develop their strong, macho, alpha side in other ways or other internal thoughts and dialogue.

My point is this – be vigilant and deliberate in how you craft your male characters, but don’t categorize or stereotype them so as to take all the romance out of them, either. Don’t be afraid to give your heroes a little finesse. It’ll make them more complex.

Don’t get me wrong! I can be attracted to a guy who uses the word “tits,” too. It just depends on the context.

QUESTION OF THE DAY:

What do you think is the most important mannerism or trait a hero must have (and must not have) in order to be authentically masculine?