This is not a redemption arc. This is blood under the fingernails. This is what he didn’t say out loud, but you’re going to write it anyway.
There’s a type of male character that turns up in workshop drafts like a bad smell. He’s stoic but deep. Or he’s tragic but forgivable. Or he’s awful in that seductive, well-read, Raymond-Chandler-by-way-of-a-podcast way. He drinks too much, says too little, broods attractively, and always, somehow, means well. And you know what? He’s boring as shit.
If you’re writing men the way you’ve seen men written before, you’re not writing. You’re photocopying. And if you’re writing yourself and hiding behind jokes or grit or elliptical phrases, you’re not being brave. You’re playing defence.
Writing the real male means writing without obligation. You’re not here to make him sympathetic, or scathing, or worthy of applause. You’re here to tell the truth: about his silence, his failures, his impulses, his missed chances. About what he didn’t say in that moment. About what he did when no one was looking.
That means no neat resolutions. No Hollywood “earned vulnerability” arcs. Just men as they are: socialised, scared, and stitched together with expectations they didn’t choose but still carry like a second skin. Flawed!
Think of the boy who punches the wall and cries after. The dad who throws out his son’s toy because he didn’t know how to play with him. The teenager who hides his softness like it’s shameful, because softness equals danger.
These aren’t villains. They’re not victims either. They’re just people. And people are messed up, contradictory, layered, real. That ought to be the space you write from.
Write a moment that a man in your life, or you, would never admit to. Something petty, small, shameful, or stupid. It doesn’t have to be violent or dramatic. It can be:
Now here’s the catch: don’t justify it. Don’t explain it. Don’t wrap it in metaphor. Just write it.
Let’s name names.
James Baldwin writes men who carry the weight of history in their silences: fractured by racism, desire, faith, and the brutal tenderness of loving in a world that doesn’t know how to love you back. His men are complex, wounded, but never reduced.
‘The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.’ That line is a refusal. Baldwin’s male characters don’t slot into easy archetypes because the archetypes were never made for them. So they build something else: through anger, through love, through exile, through memory. They are, at their core, men who resist erasure by refusing simplification.
Whether it’s David in Giovanni’s Room torn between shame and desire, or Rufus in Another Country choking on the pressure of Black masculinity in a white world, these are men trying to forge a self in the ruins of expectation. Baldwin doesn’t write to reassure. He writes to expose. And that’s exactly what writing real men should do.
Stephen King’s The Body captures boyhood without the gloss. It’s sweaty, scared, loyal, and laced with that creeping dread of growing up. These aren’t golden boys; they’re kids trying to survive each other and themselves. The violence isn’t just in the bullies or the dead body in the woods, it’s in the homes they come from, the fathers who drink, the silences that sting more than a punch.
King understands the emotional claustrophobia of adolescence better than most. That moment when you feel everything but don’t know how to say any of it. When loyalty is currency, vulnerability is a gamble, and crying in front of your mates might as well be a death sentence.
“The most important things are the hardest things to say… When they were in your head they were limitless; but when they come out they seem to be no bigger than normal things.”
That’s what The Body nails, how boyhood grief gets trapped in bravado, how love hides behind deadpan jokes and insults, how fear becomes part of the landscape. You don’t get a coming-of-age with music montages and neatly tied arcs. You get Gordie, trying to talk about the death of his brother, choking on his own worthlessness. You get Chris, trying to be good in a world that expects him to fail. You get boys who are becoming men too fast, with no map and no one to follow but each other.
King doesn’t write childhood as innocence lost. He writes it as a battlefield. And the scars don’t fade, they form the shape of the man.
Charles Bukowski drags masculinity into the gutter where it often starts, not just where it ends up. His men are pissed up, angry, horny, heartbroken, sometimes all at once, sometimes in the same damn sentence. They’re not tragic heroes; they’re human wreckage, limping through life with a half-lit cigarette and a chipped tooth. But that’s the point.
“I have always admired the villain, the outlaw, the son of a bitch… I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways.”
Bukowski doesn’t write men who want to be understood, he writes men who barely understand themselves. He exposes the need beneath the bravado, the rot under the grin, the poetry in the filth. These are not aspirational figures. They’re not meant to be. They’re the men who have fucked it: careers, relationships, dreams, and somehow keep waking up anyway.
And buried in all that is a raw kind of honesty. His men are grotesque, yes, but also vulnerable in the most uncomfortable ways. Not in the curated sadness of Instagram introspection, but in the desperate, cracked voice of someone telling a story they’ve only just realised was about them.
Bukowski writes failure without apology, because sometimes, that’s the truest thing there is.
But some men don’t admit failure; they beat it into submission. Think of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club:
“You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything.”
This isn’t transformation, it’s erasure. The man disappears and a statue takes his place. Pain isn’t processed, it’s weaponised. Vulnerability isn’t explored, it’s obliterated. Fight Club doesn’t glorify violence. It diagnoses a sickness: men taught to build identity through punishment, to replace emotion with muscle, and to trade softness for control. It’s about the fantasy of remaking yourself into something untouchable, because being touchable was too dangerous.
It’s not real growth. It’s trauma in a tailored body.
Nick Hornby understands the emotional illiteracy of modern men better than most. His characters don’t speak plainly, not about the things that matter. They talk about football, mixtapes, league tables, top five break-ups, anything but the pain they’re carrying around like a hernia.
“Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands—literally thousands—of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”
Hornby’s men are shaped by that soundtrack. Raised on The Smiths and Springsteen, feeling things they never learned how to say out loud. They don’t lash out, they wither. They don’t confess, they catalogue. And when the truth finally leaks through the cracks, when the breakup, the breakdown, the death finally forces them to speak, it doesn’t come as a monologue. It comes as a mess.
There’s no grand gesture. Just a line mumbled over a pint. A failed joke. A scratched CD. And yet, it lands harder than any polished speech. Because Hornby knows that most men don’t implode, they leak. Quietly, clumsily, and too late.
Write a memory from the perspective of a man who didn’t do the worst thing, but let it happen. He didn’t speak up. He didn’t step in. He didn’t call back.
The story isn’t about what happened. It’s about what he didn’t do, and how it’s still there, years later, rotting quietly behind his ribcage.
Not all male messes are made of noise. Some whisper. Some bristle politely over a cup of tea. Like this devastating line from Alan Bennett’s A Chip in the Sugar:
“I didn’t know you had a past. I thought I was your past.”
If you find yourself writing men who are too clever, too emotionally fluent, too self-aware, stop. You’re likely writing a version of who you wish he was, or who he wants to be seen as, not who he really is.
Instead:
That’s the version that resonates. Not the clean one. The one with stains.
Write a monologue, or a stream-of-consciousness, that tries to explain an action he took. He’s not good at it. He’s defensive, he stammers, he tells half-truths. But he’s trying. Let the failure be the power.
Because that’s the real male. Not the saviour. Not the monster. Just the man trying, and often failing, to be understood.
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The Broken Spine is a poetry and arts collective proudly published on the coastal edge of North-West England. Founded in 2019 by Alan Parry and Paul Robert Mullen – two school friends reunited after twenty years through a mutual love of poetry.
