I have broken this up in two parts because it's been a real long while since I last updated and yet there is so much to write on this chapter that it is getting real lengthy.

This chapter and the next is dedicated to avani_bhargava because she helped in giving me an idea for the next chapter for the book.

Basically, she had come across an article on writing from a guy's perspective and shared it with me so I could tell you guys about it.

So obviously, all the credit for this chapter goes to her.

And sorry in advance for being so late with this update because honestly I had so much content to write about in this and so less time that it had been delayed for long.

We will discuss the cliches of male characters in this part and then the ways to improve writing them in the next one.

***

Writing from a guy's perspective can create problems because most authors nowadays are female and obviously it is difficult for a female writer to have a clear insight on what goes on in a male person's head and how to portray a male character.

First let us look at the stereotypes you will easily find in most books, and as a lot of books / novels being written these days are YA (Young Adult) reads, so the stereotypes are mostly the same throughout.

The Bad Boy:

One Sentence definition: There's a touch of violence to him, but his effortless aura of cool makes him irresistible to the ladies; but according to me, the Bad boy is a face that needs a fist in it. 

~~~

Well, this male character can be either the antagonist or the protagonist but mostly he is the main female character's crush or love interest. You will find approximately 282K of similar stories when you simply type Bad Boy in the Search tab.

Now let us view the main characteristics a typical bad boy has:

1. Is always very handsome with the perfect muscles, chiseled jawline, messy just-got-out-of-bed hair and blah blah blah.

2. Careless about his appearance but looks good in almost anything.

[Nobody looks hot or handsome when he just woke up, okay? People do not look like Greek Gods that early in the morning. And especially not after they wake up from a hangover / wake up in the morning after being absolutely wasted last night].

3. Has a lot of tattoos. I guess this thing for bad boys having tattoos acquired fame after Cassandra Clare's Jace Herondale from The Mortal Instruments.

[The one thing I like about Damon Salvatore is that he thankfully doesn't have any tattoos].

4. Drinks, smokes, does drugs occasionally, will break into houses just for the fun of it, most have broken into McDonald's (really, I'm not kidding, when they need a snack they just go and barge in on the poor McDonald's crew by crashing in through windows)... The list could go on forever.

5. Either a soccer player, a volleyball player, a rugby player, baseball player or basically any sports player. The jock stereotype fits in here.

6. Captain of the sports team plus leads a gang of boys that are miniature gangsters.

7. Dates the hot cheerleader.

[If the cheerleader is the main character then she is very much like Caroline in the TVD books, if she's not the main character she is a bitchy, mean, batshit crazy and possessive girlfriend who will kill any one who tries to even look at her boyfriend for more than a second].

8. The bad boy nearly always has some abusive or sad past so that readers can sympathize with him and overlook his other humongous faults.

9. The reason to him being a psycho is his bad past.

[Really, please, stop making every bad person like Tom Marvolo Riddle. Not every bad person should be assigned a past as such because their past isn't always responsible for them being like that].

10. If he does anything worse or potentially harmful, he can easily get out of it just because he has a freaking bad past.

[Honestly, I'm so tired of seeing this].

11. And no matter how giant of a bully / criminalistic mindset / awful person he is, he has that inner desire to change. And nobody can f*cking see that desire in him except the main female character who thinks that if she manages to get him to fall for her, she would automatically get him to change all his ways.

[Like, seriously, that is not possible. And please don't you guys go chanting True Love Can Change Anything because it is an equally stupid notion that a person who has been an evil git for the whole of his life would somehow show a 180 degree change in five days just because he is so in love with that girl who has miraculously persuaded him to be good for her sake].

12. Literally, he hardly goes through any character development throughout the story.

13. And he is unbelievably observant. I mean who would expect a bad boy to have even noticed the shy girl who sits in the corner of the class, doing absolutely nothing except burying her nose into a book, but no he has noticed her and thinks she is interesting.

14. And one more thing I forgot to write earlier; these bad boys are flirtatious to the point of infinity and are players who think everything is a game and who believe that girls are just tissue papers.

[Yet there's still this one girl who he has never even talked to but would fall in love with her soon as he sees her? The bad boy who believes other girls are mere tissue papers, would go and pick all the stars from the sky for this one girl? Hell, naw. Not happening anytime soon, according to my dictionary].

There are so many more points I could write about bad boys but let's just move on to the others or at that rate I won't be able to get this chapter finished and during the process there's more than a 50% chance that my brain will explode from all the bullsh*t I have to write here.

The Nerd:

One Sentence Definition: The embodiment of a scared kid too afraid of straying from the rules set out for him by his parents or society, needs to grow up, for the love of God...

~~~

The nerds aren't so popular as compared to the Bad boys but they are acquiring fame really fast and have like about 51.9K stories on Wattpad.

1. The nerd is usually not that attractive hunk (like we discussed earlier) but has the cute vibe to him. Well actually, this person is the complete opposite of the bad boy.

2. Always wears glasses. Always...

3. Is lean, not very athletic but a big bookworm.

4. Knows everything about science and technology.

5. Is a goody two shoes, who will do everything his parents/ teachers says and is generally very obedient.

6. Has absolutely no other personality than that and has no idea how to have fun.

7. Is a virgin, has never seen a wine bottle, stays away from cigarettes, goes to bed at nine etc.

8. One more thing which I have seen in most stories I read is that the nerd is usually a caffeine addict and consumes a lot of coffee or tea.

9. Is that one person in the group who knows the wittiest of comebacks but always gets late to voice them out loud. 

10. Is either too silent or too much of a chatterbox. There's absolutely no in between.

11. And contrary to the bad boy, he gets the attention of the bad girl who thinks he should loosen up a little and have some fun in his life.

[I mean like, really, no one is happy with anything. If a boy is bad you want him to turn good and if he happens to be good then you want him to go bad. What kind of logic is that? Plus, why can't anyone write anything other than a story based on the Opposites Attract theory? Ever heard of Like Dissolves Like theory? The nerd can have a decent girlfriend, the bad boy can have a mean girlfriend, yes it is possible. However, I honestly do not care either way].

The Perfect Guy:

One Sentence Definition: There is no such thing in the real world and this creature only exists in the dreams of teenage fangirls.

~~~

These perfect guys have 33.3K stories on Wattpad which sets them on the third most written cliche character out there.  The Perfects are people who would never exist in a real world and they can only be found in two places; either in YA novels or in the dreams of teenage fangirls (like said earlier).

And obviously they have all those qualities every girl wants her boyfriend to have. So let's view them one by one:

1. Is unbelievably handsome as if he has just stepped out of a fairy tale.

2. Is extremely polite and well mannered, treats ladies with respect, a perfect gentleman.

3. Is expressive when it comes to feelings and will not hesitate in making his love feel like the most precious woman on Earth.

4. Gives a lot of compliments. Usually such compliments are not even necessary, but of course, the perfect guy would never want his darling girlfriend to ever have the slightest bit of low self esteem.

5. Is as good as possible but still he is not a nerd.

[I mean I don't get it. He has every good quality and behaves and is well mannered and blah blah blah but the writer goes on to indescribable lengths to assure readers that he is not a nerd. Has nerd become kind of an insult to men all over? Because, I don't agree with that].

6. He is very rich and has no financial problems, top at the game of his business etc and is like a boss of everything.

7. Despite that, he doesn't have that macho bossy touch to his personality and is like the sweetest person ever imaginable.

8. Bed tea, flowers, occasional dates, breakfast in bed, elaborate and over the top proposals, the perfect weddings, the perfect household, him looking after her and trusting her blindly, him doing all the work because his darling girlfriend is on her time of the month... All this stuff makes girls go oohing and aahing at his perfectness, like explained by gif below:

9. This person does not suffer from any sort of inferiority, which itself is rather absurd.

10. The perfect guy has everything, gets everything, does everything and life is a bed of roses for both the guy and his girlfriend.

Personally, I am not much in favor of such stories because they are kind of forcing people to believe that everything is happy, shiny, bright and nothing can penetrate the power of true love. The biggest example of a perfect guy is Edward Cullen from Twilight.

The Buffoon:

One Sentence Definition: Has no distinct character and absolutely  no other job in the story except being stupid.  

~~~

The Buffoons are known by a lot of other names as well such as the Jokester, the Clown, the Dumb Foil etc.

I'm actually surprised to see that the Buffoons have 7.1K stories on Wattpad because I wasn't expecting even that much. They are a bit too underrated in the whole wide universe of male characters written by female authors.

Now let's have a look on how these characters are written by most authors:

1. The Buffoons are the dumbest characters you will ever come across in a novel.

2. They are usually portrayed as boys with good intentions who just don't know how to act decently in a social gathering and just end up saying/doing the wrong thing making everyone stay away from them.

3. Or in some cases, they are the main female character's best friend who stays by her side and has a major crush on her but will never admit it.

4. In other cases, they are the kind of people who get kicked around a lot by both boys and girls because they apparently have no clue on what to do in which situation.

5. They are Karen Smith kind of stupid in most stories. They will laugh when it isn't appropriate, their suggestions are horrible, basically they just don't know anything.

6. They are nearly always failing subjects.

7. But still there has to be one girl who likes the buffoon and secretly observes him. 

[Hey Presto! The start of an ever blooming love story...]

8. And the girl they like is usually way out of their league or rather they tend to believe she is.

Basically, every single thing the Buffoon does is nonsensical and will make any sane person go like:

If you want to see what buffoons are actually like, you can check out these examples:

Mike Newton from Twilight

Augustus Gloop from Charlie And The Chocolate Factory

Crabbe and Goyle from Harry Potter

Tootles from Peter Pan

Tyler Lockwood (to an extent) from The Vampire Diaries Novels

The Strong Silent Type:

One Sentence Definition: Speak up, man, if you don't express how will we know what you want?   

~~~

Now these guys have roughly about 7K stories on Wattpad. And that too is a lot considering that nearly all the stories have a rather traditionally set story line. I really wonder why the audience doesn't ever get bored by seeing and reading the same thing over and over.

1. The Strong Silent types are nearly always the combination of a Perfect Guy and a Nerd / Bad boy.

2. The silent guys are those who you see sitting in the corner of the cafeteria with a brooding look on their faces. And the first example that pops into my mind while writing this is Edward Cullen.

3. Or they are those efficient and top of everything CEOs.

4. No matter what the guy is (student, businessman, kidnapper, criminal, alpha etc), there is one quality which remains persistent throughout the book. And is made rather a big deal of. And that thing is his SILENCE.

5. He is usually very observant and he silently observes everything including the most minute of details because it's almost as if this guy has a super high tech lens fitted into his eyes that can see everything no matter how small or negligible it is.

[If you are going out with this guy, remember he's going to take notice of everything but never really comment on it. He will notice the furniture of the restaurant you had a date in, the name tag plus the outfit of the waitress who served you, the receipt number on the bill, the magazine in that old man's hand who's sitting in the opposite corner etc etc. Thank God these people aren't so many in real life, or else I would have died if I had to go out with that kind of person].

6. He's a stalker. But he will never admit it. Plus, some people make it appear as cute and lovey dovey. But in all seriousness, it isn't lovey dovey at all.

[If I was given the character of the female lead role in such books, I would get the guy arrested not marry him in the end. And that would be a perfect and morally correct happily ever after].

7. He tends to keep all his feelings inside and we readers never know what's going on in his mind, which mostly is not a good thing because no matter how thrilling an author wants his/her story to be, the reader still must be able to interact with it. But if the reader just can't figure out things for himself/herself then it's most likely that your book will be abandoned.

8. But when these guys find the love of their life, their personality does a complete flip in the opposite direction. That is, they start to transition into becoming a perfect guy.

9. And usually the reason to their silent demeanor is some sort of horrible past incident.

[Frankly speaking, give your characters back stories but do not make them so tragic. Why is it that every specific character has suffered a haunting past? Couldn't some people just have a good life instead of being angsty and crapped out all the time? I'm just so tired of this].

10. In short, these characters are the portrayal of a serious, down to earth, masculine sort of person and I know this is what the author wants to write in the first place, but in the end it just ends up like an angsty character with lots of issues and who just doesn't have any idea to express himself.

The Hero:

One Sentence Definition: Stop all the blood, gore and action please, violence is not always the only solution and nobody wants you go and nobly sacrifice yourself.

~~~

The noble and self sacrificial heroes have nearly 30K stories on Wattpad. So yeah it gets them the fourth position on the whole list of cliches but I can't go and rearrange the sequence so at the end of this, I will include the sequenced list for you all.

[And you must probably be thinking I bother a lot about the statistics but really I want you to know each detail. So I search the tags such stories have then take out the average of the total results so I can roughly have an idea how many stories each cliche has here.]

1. The heroes are, in as simple words as possible, a chemical reaction between The Bad Boys and The Buffoons. The product which we get after reacting these two together, is a fictional hero.

2. They have really high self esteem.

3. They are unbelievably reckless and usually have short tempers. 

4. They will want to do dangerous things but draw a line for themselves because they do have moral values.

5. They are those extremely possessive guys who would get jealous even if someone stared at their girlfriend for more than a second.

6. And yet these heroes will never hesitate from any sort of sacrifice.

7. They are those type of people who put other people before them a bit too much and their heroic thinking usually clouds their sense of judgement.

8. So obviously they tend to be a lot irrational and take quick decisions.

9. They are by far the most masculine version of a male character you can get in today's fiction but still their only masculinity lies in the action.

10. Examples of fictional hero stereotypical characters are:

Daniel Grigori from Fallen [Lauren Kate]

Harry Potter (to a certain extent) from Harry Potter series [J.K Rowling]

Michael Mayfair from Taltos [Anne Rice]

***

First Position (extremely cliche): Bad Boys with 282K stories

Second Position (most cliche): Nerds with 51.9K stories 

Third Position (comparatively cliche): Perfect Guys with 33.3K stories

Fourth Position (relatively cliche): Heroes with 30K stories

Fifth Position (moderately cliche):Buffoons with 7.1K stories

Sixth Position (still cliche): Silent Types with 7K stories

***

Here I have included a list of male characters in books that I found perfectly written:

1. Newton Scamander from Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them [J.K Rowling]

2. Ronald Weasley from Harry Potter [J.K Rowling]

3. Ethan Martin from One Mountain Away [Emilie Richards]

4. Leon Mitchell from Gentlemen And Players [Joanne Harris]

5. Daniel Carpenter from The Queen's Fool [Phillipa Gregory]

6. Jest and Hatta from Heartless [Marissa Meyer]

7. Malcolm Bannister from The Racketeer [John Grisham]

8. Lord Asriel from His Dark Materials Trilogy [Philip Pullman]

9. Mike Harness and Selden Rose from Lipstick Jungle [Candace Bushnell]

10. Gareth Llewellyn from Octavia [Jilly Cooper]

11. George Knightley from Emma [Jane Austen]

12. Ashlar Templeton from Taltos [Anne Rice]

13. Mr Mansfield from Smith [Leon Garfield]

14. Captain Hook (Ravello) from Peter Pan In Scarlet [Geraldine McCaughrean]

15. Archibald Craven and Colin Craven from The Secret Garden [Frances H. Burnett]

***

And the remaining portion will be included in the next chapter.

Stay tuned for the next update which can be even late than this one so I am warning you beforehand.