Writing Gender

I would never dream of writing from a man’s point of view. As a nonfiction writer, it’s hard for me to imagine writing from anyone’s point of view but my own.

William Faulkner’s novels include POVs from male and female characters alike. One of Flannery O’Connor’s most memorable characters is a very disturbed young man named Hazel Motes. When I taught English to teenaged boys, they were all surprised to learn that the author of The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton, is a woman. Memoirs of a Geisha was written by a white man.

I’ve been reading a great escapist series called the Thursday Next Novels by Jasper Fforde (check out www.thursdaynext.com). Fforde reimagines 1980s England where the world revolves around books. The hero of the novels is Thursday Next, a woman.

So how convincingly does this man write from a woman’s POV? He must have done something right, because I was well into the third novel before I even thought about the gender difference. But then I suddenly realized that Fforde’s female character was decidedly androgynous in my mind. I can picture some of the minor characters better than I can picture the heroine—and all of the characters I can easily picture are men. Thursday Next is a bit of a blank character in my mind, as much as I enjoy reading about her traveling in and out of beloved classic novels such as Jane Eyre.

That fact doesn’t really bother me. It’s only begun to trouble me now that Thursday is pregnant—and she continues to place herself in harm’s way through her job in defending literature. I may not have noticed this fact before I was ever pregnant. But as a pregnant woman, I was considerably more concerned for my safety even though the most dangerous activity I engaged in was driving a car.

I’m still going to finish the novels. They give me a great escape from real life. And I’ve long enjoyed many works of fiction that require a much stronger suspension of disbelief.

What do you think? Can a man write a convincing woman or vice versa? Have you ever tried to write a character of the opposite sex?