: Re: Need advice about changing character's gender I had this idea for a story/novel that I was very excited about, but also very worried about. The idea had a plot where the character development

@Holmes449

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Each writer is of one gender, and one sexual orientation, and in order for their stories to reflect real life, they have to learn to write from the POV of other genders and other sexual orientations.

Don't be sexist on yourself, male heterosexual writers have written about homosexual males and homosexual females. Heck, people write convincingly about prostitutes, hit men, rape victims and serial killers and master thieves that they have never actually been. And medieval wizards, extra-terrestrials, kings and warriors.

Don't be afraid of writing what you want and what you think makes your story the strongest. Changing one of your characters might make your story feel unrealistic, because other characters in your book would not react the same to a female, and the character in question might react differently as a female, and these disparities can make the plot feel forced or unnatural.

My advice is leave it alone, and don't worry about selling to an audience that judges you on anything other than the quality of your writing and the quality of the story.

You might lose some sales to the judgy, but you would likely lose MORE sales by straining to fit a woman into the role of a bisexual male, and forcing the partner as a heterosexual male instead of a bisexual male. I believe the necessary changes in mindset and attitude (and presumably the loss of social tensions) would make this "not their story" anymore. The story was written for and belongs to two bisexual men in love, not a heterosexual couple in love.

EDIT: I see many suggestions about getting bisexual men to read your book and tell you what they think. That can be difficult, if you don't already know any! For most of us it is hard enough to get family to read our books and provide feedback, much less strangers we also want to qualify by gender and sexual orientation. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe Facebook has a group.

As an alternative, I would suggest reading bisexual authors that perhaps have written about bisexual relationships; that is much easier to search for on the web. Here is a list of about 200 Bisexual Writers, not all of them recent. But you could check out their pages and see what they've written, and perhaps learn from it. If they have any bisexual characters, their first-hand experience would help you understand what they felt was important to portray and write about. Not to copy them, but to get an idea of how a bisexual character thinks.

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