Hey! I know you.

Since we were talking about character last time…we were talking about character last time, right? Anyway. I love female characters. Intelligent, strong, multi-faceted, flawed female characters. I love reading and writing them. I love male characters. Intelligent, strong, multi-faceted, flawed male characters.

I tend to write from both male and female POVs. I think a lot of writers do. Roni over at Fiction Groupie had a great post on writing from the male POV.

But I’ve been thinking lately more about female characters especially and their evolution in fiction. And lo and behold, Sarah Rees Brennan has a really interesting post looking at and looking for girls in fiction.

So what I want to know is this. Do you prefer reading/ writing male or female characters? What makes a good female character? Who or what has influenced how you see or write female characters?

Rebel, rebel

There's a lot of talk about rules in writing. And I have to cheerfully admit that I break a lot of them when I write.

I will write from more than one POV. I think I know how to do that so that my readers don't get lost. And it works for the story and the characters and me.

I switch up tenses. I use flashbacks and internal dialogue.

I don't do all of those things all of the time, but I do them all because I think it serves the story I'm telling and I think my readers are smart enough to understand.

I'm really wrestling with some of the choices I made in one of the two novels currently making me crazy, and they center on POV and tense. I'm just not sure what is going to work, and until I figure it out nothing good is going to come out of my feeble attempts at writing more.

So tell me. What rules do you break? And how do you make your decisions about such things in your work?