How to write realistic female dialogue

Question

I just can't make my dialogue sound like it's being said by a woman. As a friend of mine pointed out, "This woman talks just like you, Jack."

I tried imitating the speech patterns of various females I know, but it just doesn't work. Most women I know talk about things that interest women (e.g. shoes, shopping, baseball, etc.), and not about wars, monsters and magic, which is what my book is about.

My best attempts merely made them sound British (but still like men, and with a funny choice of words).

Any ideas or guidelines would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I know women do talk about the same things as men; that's exactly my point. I'm wondering if there's any short-cut to making a character sound more like a woman, without reverting to fake stereotypes.

Answer 1

First of all, thinking of some conversations as solely the domain of women and some as solely the domain of men is not going to get you anywhere. For example I know of many female computer programmers, women in a male-dominated career field, who can talk circles around most guys when it comes to discussing computer hardware. I know men who enjoy sharing favorite recipes and guys who look at the Ralph Lauren lookbook for women in order to find nice fashions for their wives and can talk circles around some fashion-averse women when it comes to cuts of shirts.

Women who are in the middle of a war will talk about war. Women who can practice magic or are affected by it will most definitely talk about magic - if you've been reading fantasy and haven't come across women talking about magic you've been reading a very, very narrow selection. If there's a monster prowling around town you can bet your bottom dollar women will talk about it as much as men. Some women may even talk about the best way to kill it just as some men will try to avoid the subject out of sheer fear.

If your characters talk just like you, the problem isn't the gender. I bet the men all talk just like you as well. The issue is fully realizing your characters as other than you. For that read the answers on Getting inside someone else's head. Sure, women can provide a perspective that men don't, but their perspective is informed by their background, experiences, friendships, and interests. These may be influenced by their sex, but their sex is not the sum total of these things!

For more on specifically thinking in terms of a different gender than yours, see pitfalls of writing a main character of different gender to the author and the opposite sex in first person. But my best piece of advice is to focus less on the fact that your characters are female and focus on fleshing out the personhood of all your characters.

Answer 2

There's a can of worms I'm going to try to avoid opening here...

Suffice to say that I think a lot of what informs the "difference" between men and women comes down to societal metrics. If the society you are describing is more equal some differences will disappear as societal roles are redefined.

From what I have been told by women I have known is that women are more aware of their moods than men tend to be. Emotion is often seen as a more valuable tool and more subtly applied by women I have known than men. Part of this is the fact that the male hormonal balance was most accurately described by my step-mother: Women have a period every month, men have one it starts when they're about thirteen and lasts, in some cases, until they die.

Attempts to rely upon the manipulation of emotion to secure a power base may result in the general physical differences between men and women. There are no absolutes. Sometimes men are sensitive and emotionally wise, sometimes women like to throw their weight about.

So referring to justkt's answer above I would concentrate on thinking of people as people. Sure there are tendencies that they are going to be more or less likely to display but that's all.

When re-examining character dialogue it's best to question things about the character as an entity relative to the others there present. Factors such as social status, raw physical power, intelligence and natural charisma are all going to have a bearing on the kinds of things that a character is likely to say in a given circumstance.

It is also worth bearing in mind the tension in the difference between what a character might say in privacy with peers or those less powerful and how they might be forced to act in broader society. The greater the tension between these two the more toll it is likely to take on the character themselves. In a society where women are oppressed, belittled and ignored they are likely to be mostly silent and to choose their words carefully in a public forum but in private their bottled up tensions may overflow in line with how their character wishes to express their "true identity". If you reverse this into a society where women oppress men the same sorts of behaviours are likely to exhibit the opposite way around, it's the situation that produces the reactions not the gender of the participants.

If women are having issue with your female characters it is possible that your male characters are also a little bland, if they aren't then you just need to apply whatever method you apply to differentiating your male characters to also differentiating the female ones with all the above borne in mind. If you have no method for telling the audience how the characters are different it is possible that they aren't signalled as different enough across the board, in which case if you solve the general problem it will, of necessity, mitigate the specific one.