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I have more female MCs than male MCs, but my only first person so far has been a male. Strangely, he idealises all the women in his life. Then again, my female MC who actually has a love interest tends to overlook the most appalling personality flaws (major drug abuse) so maybe it's just me whitewashing everything with LOVE heart .

I came up with an idea, like, two hours ago, so it's possible my MC this time around will be female, and first person, which I haven't tried before. She'll be the sort of person I like but the novel may end up being set like in the 40s or 50s, so that might be a tricky thing to actually write. I'm unsure about powerful female figures in the criminal underworld in that era. And I'm wary about, as you say, writing too much of myself into her. My other female characters share my passion for art, music and poetry, but are quite different people in many ways to myself. This character has too much of the sort of person I'd like to be about her. Lauren Bacall meets a non-zany Harley Quinn, essentially.

(That is, I admire Bacall's ability to melt men with a glance and her sexy class, while I acknowledge I share with Harl a rather foolish and naive tendency to idealise the dangerous, obsess, and gloss over it all by saying it's all alright because of love.)

The character may end up dead by the end of it which is why this concerns me, as I don't want to end up writing my own decent into hopelessness and lose all passion and drive. If my male MC does that (which an old MC did have the tendency to do) I simply sigh over the poor thing.

Anyway. I think I've rambled from the topic quite enough.

I tend to write from a male's point of view because it's what's easiest for me- or sometimes I'll write a particularly unfeminine girl. If I'm feeling like a challenge, then I'll write from a female's point of view. Which is funny, considering I'm a female, but I guess just because you are one doesn't mean you understand them. xD

I've heard the same thing. Definitely makes sense- after all, the best thing to write is what you know, right?

My WriMo story this year is following a female. Last year was a little complicated. Third person omniscient, that followed my MC girl, and her best friend, who was a guy. But, down to it, most of the story was as a female.

I actually started out writing from a male PoV, though, and several non-WriMo stories I'm writing on the side are male. (one of them is a gay male, but anyhoo.)

Personally I like to think that I follow certain Native American philosophies on gender (or at least, what they used to be) in so much as that male/female really doesn't matter so much in itself. They had the berdache or "two spirit persons" who had the soul of both a male and a female in one person. So - like a man doing a woman's job (like being a healer etc.) and a woman doing a man's job (i.e. warrior etc.) - only the roles weren't so rigid and these people were mostly praised, unlike in American society where you pretty much have only two genders.

In essence, I try and incorporate aspects of both genders into one being, if that makes any sense. Sometimes I have both a male and female main protagonist though I do tend to use more male characters. But it's not like I'm not without female characters, and I'd probably fail the Bechdel test more often than not...but I'm okay with that.

And I write almost elusively in third person. I think I'd have a hard time writing in first since I'd be stuck in one person's view of what was going on. It's probably why I avoid it in the first place.

Mainly I write female POV, but in one of my stories it's in male POV.

And there's a quote from Richard Rhodes--
"All your characters are you; virtuals of you; writing is a controlled process of splitting into virtual personalities in the safe havens of the page. I can't tell you how to do that except it feels like self-hypnosis and probably is. Controlled meditation helps. Once you've invented a character and gotten to know her, you relax into the role and she appears."