A Female Main Character’s psychology is based on assessing balance. The female Main Character resolves inequities by comparing surpluses to deficiencies.

The manner employed in resolving the inequity will involve creating a surplus where a surplus is desired, creating a deficiency where a deficiency is desired, creating a surplus so a deficiency is felt elsewhere, creating a deficiency so a surplus will be felt elsewhere. Through the application of one’s own force, hills and valleys can be created and filled either to directly address the inequity or to create a change in the flow of energies that will ultimately come together in a new hill or disperse creating a new valley. These are the four primary inequity-resolving techniques of an female mental sex character.

It is important to note that these techniques are applied both to others and to oneself. Either way, manipulating surplus and deficiency describes the approach. When selecting female or male, typically, the choice is as simple as deciding if you want to tell a story about a woman or a man. But there is another consideration that is being employed with growing frequency in modern stories: putting the psyche of one sex into the skin of another.

This does not refer only to the “sex change” comedies, but to many action stories with male mental sex female Main Characters (e.g. Aliens) and many decision stories with female mental sex male Main Characters (e.g. Prince of Tides and The Hunt for Red October). When an author writes a part for a woman, it would intuitively use the female psyche for that character. Yet, by simply changing the name of the character from Mary to Joe and shifting the appropriate gender terms, the character would ostensibly become a man. But that man would not seem like a man. Even if all the specific feminine dialog were changed, even if all the culturally dictated manifestations were altered, the underlying psyche of the character would have the female, female bias, rather than the male, male bias.

Sometimes stereotypes are propagated by what an audience expects to see, which filters the message and dilutes the truth. By placing the female psyche in a male character, preconceptions no longer prevent the message from being heard. A word of caution — this technique can make a Main Character seem “odd” in some hard to define way to your audience. So although the message may fare better, empathy between your audience and your Main Character may not.

Excerpted from
Dramatica Story Development Software