Writing for Guys

I know that without punctuation that title can be a bit nebulus, but I do plan to cover both major means in this post.

First, I want to address writing for a male audience. When I write, I want everyone who reads it regardless of gender to get lost in the story and love my world and my characters like I do. However, I do also try to make my writing accessible to a male audience. In my adult fantasy series I have 3 male main characters. I plan on having some beautiful women, (one of which I have already introduced) I have internal narration from the male characters that you will not get from the female characters. As a male reader, as I walk down the fantasy aisle at Borders, this is what I am looking for as a reader. I look for a male author with a male main character in a series that does not cross into Scifi. So really I am writing the book that I am looking for to read.

Second, I wanted to talk a little about being a male writer. Writing seems to be such a female heavy profession. Yes there are very successful male authors, in fact there are a lot of them, but just walking around bookstores it seems like the number female authors greatly outweighs the number of male authors. I think I understand why, I think that people do not believe that guys should be authors unless it is nonfiction and or about sports, video games, or they are writing articles for Playboy. When I tell people I want to write a book their eyes glaze over, twice. First, they think, "oh great an artist, no future here." Then I get the double glaze, "yeah real guys don't read or write." I would like to change these stereotypes. Guys get out there and write for guys. Write because you loved it, not because you want to get rich as an author. (because most of the time you won't.)

And if you see someone looking for writing direction, encourage them to try to write for guys. How many great books are we losing because there are a lot of guys not being pulled into our realms of imagination?