My three year old son has tired of Princess movies. Recently I added some ‘boy’ movies to the mix: Nemo, ToyStory, The Black Stallion (TBS), & Bob, The Builder. I also just finished All The Pretty Horses (ATPH). Watching The Black Stallion and reading ATPH so close together gave me an idea. ATPH’s uses dialogue almost exclusively to let the two male main characters talk about what the main character is thinking or doing. So the second main character is a device to see what the main character is thinking. But even as a device, there isn’t a lot of dialogue. Then I watched TBS. The first forty-five minutes of the movie have very little dialogue. It’s very noticable compared to most any other movie.
I’m going to go out on a limb here (a short one) and say both ATPH and TBS are targeted to the male gender more than the female gender. And both have very sparse dialogue. So we all make jokes about how much women love to talk. Does the quantity of dialogue in the written form (such as a novel) imply the target audience’s gender?
Another thing these both had in common, as a result of little dialogue, was the focus on action and scenery.
So my main character of my work in progress is a female and my target audience is women. So this new insight doesn’t help that story much. However, I have another story idea in a different genre with a main character of a man close to retirement. I was concerned how to write him authentically because I love writing dialogue. I’ll need to grow my ability to write action and scenery better in order to bring this character to life.
What makes a male character real to you in a story or movie?