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shadowkatIn lieu of the Wed Reading Meme, mainly because I haven't read anything interesting to comment on this week. So figure I'll talk about writing about gender instead.
Over the course of the last few weeks, a couple of posts about the differences between male and female writers popped up online. The first, was a comment to a post that my cousin made concerning the popular novel Girl on a Train, and how well written the female characters were, even if they were all crazy. And that from a male point of few, seeing the inner workings of the female mind, he couldn't help but wonder whether women really thought like that. His wife stated, no, these women are crazy. (Although it did make me wonder about my cousin. Seriously? You're going to base your understanding of the inner workings of the female mind on a dark noir thriller? Be like me basing my understanding of the male mind on Thomas Harris novels. He was probably just joking, or at least one would hope.) At any rate - the comment that caught my eye, stated:
First off? Over the course of my life, I've been told at various times that I write like a guy. At school, friends would ask me to hand write a note that came from a guy to fool someone. They wrote too "pretty", while my style resembled my Dad's - crisp block letters and clean.
In fandom, a couple of people thought I was guy, which blew my mind. I tend to write in a conversational, somewhat snarky style, most of the time. Also, when I was on one particular fanboard, a poster got pissed with me for assuming s/he was female. S/he preferred to be neither. (I'd been told elsewhere by folks who'd met s/he that s/he was in fact female. But they didn't want their gender specified online.)
The nifty thing about online posting is -- if you so desire -- you can basically keep gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, looks, etc - invisible. All people know about you is what you decide to convey through words. And after over 10 years of online interaction on various fan boards and social medias, I can tell you this - you can't tell if someone is black, white, purple, gay, straight, queer, female, male, transgender, or anything in between unless they tell you or indicate it somehow. Can't tell by icons or GIF - women use male icons all the time and vice versa. Can't tell by poster name. A lot of people deliberately pick gender neutral names or there are women who pick male names and vice versa.
Writing style? No, sorry. It's rarely clear.
Interests? Please.
Second? My father used to tell my Mom that women were more nuturing and men less so. Possibly his explanation for why she was better at staying home with the kiddies, while he worked? The Universe being the eternal jokester, decided to give him a daughter who resembled his style, and a son who resembled my Mom's. My brother loves to garden, he inherited the green thumb, he's nuturing, love children, and is great at taking care of animals. I, on the other hand, have more of a protector personality. Kill plants. Have no idea what to do with small children. My brother was always into fashion and staying on top of the latest trends, I just wear whatever is comfortable.
We were discussing books once, my brother, my father and myself. My poor Dad, who is a fan of Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy, had to deal with his son - who couldn't stand either, because he found them to be too macho and as a result, unrelatable and unrealistic. Portraying a male stereotype.
He said, a lot of women wrote male characters far better. Which blew my Dad's mind, because he bought into the view that you can't write the opposite gender.
It's not that hard, actually. You write the opposite gender more or less the same way you write your own, as an individual person. Then imagine what it would be like to be that person, to be under their skin. It does help if you read a lot of books, by both genders. I've known male writers who write women characters better than some female novelists.
Speaking of novelists and gender writing? Magaret Atwood sucks at writing male characters. It's my major issue with her novels. She doesn't like men that much and has some serious issues with the male gender. Great prose stylist, sucks at character development. It's my main quibble with The Blind Assassin -- I find her male characters to be a bit cliche and stereotypical. The female characters on the other hand are well-drawn. She gets away with it - by having the novel in the point of view of the female characters, both of which have serious and understandable issues with men.
Another literary writer who doesn't write gender well is Jeffrey Eugendies whose depiction of female characters threw me out of his novel The Marriage Plot. The lead character was such a cliche, that I gave up. Felt the same way about his earlier novel The Virgin Suicides - which had exactly the same problem. He sucks at writing female characters. The male characters were fine.
Oddly, some genre writers are often better at it. I don't know why. Agatha Christie was a master. So too is George RR Martin. Dorothy Dunnett also was quite adept. The book that I'm reading now, a historical romance, entitled the Highwayman, has great male characters. Only one female character - so hard to tell, but even she's well drawn and not a cliche. Same deal with Courtney Milan and Illona Andrews.
I think the trick with writing gender is the same one in regards to writing POC, don't make gender or POC an issue. Write it color-blind. Flip the roles. Make the female the hero, and the guy the damsel.
The other comment that I saw online was that men write better historicals than women, because, hello, they are about war and not parlor dramas. I laughed. Considering one of the best historical novels to come out in years was Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bringing Up the Bodies. And let's not forget the blokes who wrote parlor novels - Julian Fellows - Downton Abbey (okay television series), the guy who wrote The Parade, and Thomas Hardy. So. I beg to differ. Also, let's not forget Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Series or PD Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster. And on the nonfiction front? We have Doris Kearns Goodwin.
I've been told that women read more broadly than men. It's hard to wrap my head around this. Because, my father reads like I do, he devours books. Granted he's more particular. But he does read a broad range. As does my brother. I know a lot of men who read. I have a male co-worker in his 60s who enjoyed the Twilight Novels and ahem, 50 Shades of Grey. He also loved Lord of Light and various sci-fi novels, and historical fiction and non-fiction. He reads a wide range. While I know women who will only read non-fiction or the newspaper, they have no tolerance for fiction. Actually the female lead in the film 84 Charing Cross Road, famously states that fiction is a waste of time because it's not about real people.
In short, assuming you read all that, our gender appears to have very little to do with how we write, read, or what interests us in books. Yet for some reason or other, people persist in thinking it does.
Over the course of the last few weeks, a couple of posts about the differences between male and female writers popped up online. The first, was a comment to a post that my cousin made concerning the popular novel Girl on a Train, and how well written the female characters were, even if they were all crazy. And that from a male point of few, seeing the inner workings of the female mind, he couldn't help but wonder whether women really thought like that. His wife stated, no, these women are crazy. (Although it did make me wonder about my cousin. Seriously? You're going to base your understanding of the inner workings of the female mind on a dark noir thriller? Be like me basing my understanding of the male mind on Thomas Harris novels. He was probably just joking, or at least one would hope.) At any rate - the comment that caught my eye, stated:
Mike V
Question: "How do you write women so well?"
"Simple, I start with a man, and then I take away reason and accountability."
Deb V: Hey!
First off? Over the course of my life, I've been told at various times that I write like a guy. At school, friends would ask me to hand write a note that came from a guy to fool someone. They wrote too "pretty", while my style resembled my Dad's - crisp block letters and clean.
In fandom, a couple of people thought I was guy, which blew my mind. I tend to write in a conversational, somewhat snarky style, most of the time. Also, when I was on one particular fanboard, a poster got pissed with me for assuming s/he was female. S/he preferred to be neither. (I'd been told elsewhere by folks who'd met s/he that s/he was in fact female. But they didn't want their gender specified online.)
The nifty thing about online posting is -- if you so desire -- you can basically keep gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, looks, etc - invisible. All people know about you is what you decide to convey through words. And after over 10 years of online interaction on various fan boards and social medias, I can tell you this - you can't tell if someone is black, white, purple, gay, straight, queer, female, male, transgender, or anything in between unless they tell you or indicate it somehow. Can't tell by icons or GIF - women use male icons all the time and vice versa. Can't tell by poster name. A lot of people deliberately pick gender neutral names or there are women who pick male names and vice versa.
Writing style? No, sorry. It's rarely clear.
Interests? Please.
Second? My father used to tell my Mom that women were more nuturing and men less so. Possibly his explanation for why she was better at staying home with the kiddies, while he worked? The Universe being the eternal jokester, decided to give him a daughter who resembled his style, and a son who resembled my Mom's. My brother loves to garden, he inherited the green thumb, he's nuturing, love children, and is great at taking care of animals. I, on the other hand, have more of a protector personality. Kill plants. Have no idea what to do with small children. My brother was always into fashion and staying on top of the latest trends, I just wear whatever is comfortable.
We were discussing books once, my brother, my father and myself. My poor Dad, who is a fan of Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy, had to deal with his son - who couldn't stand either, because he found them to be too macho and as a result, unrelatable and unrealistic. Portraying a male stereotype.
He said, a lot of women wrote male characters far better. Which blew my Dad's mind, because he bought into the view that you can't write the opposite gender.
It's not that hard, actually. You write the opposite gender more or less the same way you write your own, as an individual person. Then imagine what it would be like to be that person, to be under their skin. It does help if you read a lot of books, by both genders. I've known male writers who write women characters better than some female novelists.
Speaking of novelists and gender writing? Magaret Atwood sucks at writing male characters. It's my major issue with her novels. She doesn't like men that much and has some serious issues with the male gender. Great prose stylist, sucks at character development. It's my main quibble with The Blind Assassin -- I find her male characters to be a bit cliche and stereotypical. The female characters on the other hand are well-drawn. She gets away with it - by having the novel in the point of view of the female characters, both of which have serious and understandable issues with men.
Another literary writer who doesn't write gender well is Jeffrey Eugendies whose depiction of female characters threw me out of his novel The Marriage Plot. The lead character was such a cliche, that I gave up. Felt the same way about his earlier novel The Virgin Suicides - which had exactly the same problem. He sucks at writing female characters. The male characters were fine.
Oddly, some genre writers are often better at it. I don't know why. Agatha Christie was a master. So too is George RR Martin. Dorothy Dunnett also was quite adept. The book that I'm reading now, a historical romance, entitled the Highwayman, has great male characters. Only one female character - so hard to tell, but even she's well drawn and not a cliche. Same deal with Courtney Milan and Illona Andrews.
I think the trick with writing gender is the same one in regards to writing POC, don't make gender or POC an issue. Write it color-blind. Flip the roles. Make the female the hero, and the guy the damsel.
The other comment that I saw online was that men write better historicals than women, because, hello, they are about war and not parlor dramas. I laughed. Considering one of the best historical novels to come out in years was Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bringing Up the Bodies. And let's not forget the blokes who wrote parlor novels - Julian Fellows - Downton Abbey (okay television series), the guy who wrote The Parade, and Thomas Hardy. So. I beg to differ. Also, let's not forget Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Series or PD Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster. And on the nonfiction front? We have Doris Kearns Goodwin.
I've been told that women read more broadly than men. It's hard to wrap my head around this. Because, my father reads like I do, he devours books. Granted he's more particular. But he does read a broad range. As does my brother. I know a lot of men who read. I have a male co-worker in his 60s who enjoyed the Twilight Novels and ahem, 50 Shades of Grey. He also loved Lord of Light and various sci-fi novels, and historical fiction and non-fiction. He reads a wide range. While I know women who will only read non-fiction or the newspaper, they have no tolerance for fiction. Actually the female lead in the film 84 Charing Cross Road, famously states that fiction is a waste of time because it's not about real people.
In short, assuming you read all that, our gender appears to have very little to do with how we write, read, or what interests us in books. Yet for some reason or other, people persist in thinking it does.