Writing Across Gender Lines
By Jo Eberhardt | November 4, 2017 |
Photo by Flickr user Tatters
If you ask a small child to draw a tree, they will almost inevitably draw a brown rectangle topped by a cloud-shaped green blob. That’s what a tree looks like. We all know that. We recognise it instantly for what it is.
Even children too young to draw the shapes will scribble a brown trunk with a green top. We can look at that mess of scribbles and say, “Oh, what a beautiful tree you’ve drawn.”
But as adults, we know that very few trees actually look like that. There are oak trees and pine trees and palm trees; trees that are good for climbing, and trees with long, thin trunks that reach into the sky; trees with leaves that turn golden in the autumn, and trees that turn purple in the spring; trees with a bounty of mouth-watering fruit, trees covered in sweet-smelling flowers, and trees that will puncture you with their thorns if you dare get too close.
Even among individual species of trees, there are wide variations. The soil, the weather, the sunlight–the environment in which a tree grows–will change the shape, size, and health of any given tree. And let’s not even get started on seasonal variations. A tree in spring often looks significantly different to the same tree in winter.
In short, if you went through life thinking that all trees looked like brown rectangles with cloud-shaped green blobs on top, you’d spend a lot of time wondering what all those other tall, fruit- and flower-coated growing things were.
And yet I’d be willing to bet that if you asked most adults to draw a tree, their picture would like something like this:
Generic Tree by Arya wigunavadhana
And that’s perfectly okay–we, as experienced humans, know that the image isn’t accurate. But it’s a helpful visual shorthand. And one that I, as someone who struggles to draw even stick figures, am incredibly grateful to be able to embrace.
It’s only problematic if an expert–someone who makes their living teaching people about trees–claims that this is what all trees look like. Or, in fact, if they claim this is what any normal tree looks like year-round.
People are not trees
Nonetheless, there are specific images we tend to draw on when we think about people; particularly when we think about people of a gender different to our own.
There’s the “alpha male” who likes sports and cars and telling people what to do.
There’s the “princess” who likes flowery, floaty pink things and needs to be rescued from difficult tasks like running in a straight line.
There’s the “badass” who plays by his own rules and has a witty quip for every situation.
There’s the “strong female character” who wears combat boots and is too busy kicking butt to both take names, but suddenly forgets everything when the hero turns up.
I could go on. But you get the picture.
All of these characters are exactly as accurate to real life people as that scrawled brown and green image is to a real tree.
If you want to write authentic, accurate, interesting characters of either gender, that’s really all you need to know. People are not stereotypes. People are fully developed individuals, a product of their upbringing, environment, personality, experiences, and gender.
In real life, the alpha male may go home and cry into a tub of Häagen-Dazs because he’s scared nobody likes him. The princess may spend her free time rebuilding a classic car. The badass mows his mother’s lawn every weekend, and the strong female character has a collection of vintage barbie dolls. In real life, people are three-dimensional.
And we, as experts in teaching people about empathy and human nature, do a vast disservice to our readers if we populate our stories with caricatures and “helpful visual shorthands”.
But how do I write across gender authentically?
The short answer is that you write the character as a human being, rather than a gender. That’s not to say that there aren’t differences between genders. But other than the physiological differences between cis-gendered men and women, the majority of those differences are cultural in nature, not biological.
Or, to put it another way, there are greater variations within genders than between them.
If you understand the environment in which your characters have been raised–particularly the gender expectations placed on them from a young age–you’re basically ready to go. And if you’re not sure how the other gender is socialised, ask.
Nonetheless, there is one major issue that often arises when talking about authors writing the opposite gender:
Focusing on body parts.
There is a very well-known male fantasy author who feels compelled to have his female characters think about their breasts on a regular basis. This is not something women do–at least, not without a reason to do it. As a woman, I don’t think about the size, shape, position, or movement of my breasts any more than I think the same things about my shoulders. Nonetheless, female characters thinking about their bra size or the movement of their breasts is such a common (bad) trope that it’s worth mentioning. Don’t do this.
While I can’t, off the top of my head, think of a book I’ve read where a female writer does a similar thing in regards to a man constantly thinking about his penis, I have absolutely no doubt that it happens. Don’t do this, either.
People inhabit their bodies, but unless there’s a reason for them to be thinking about an individual body part, they generally don’t.
Likewise, unless you’ve had some very detailed and honest conversations with people of the opposite gender about menstruation, how an erection feels, or other sex-specific experiences, you’re probably best to leave that stuff to the imagination.
What aspects of writing across gender lines do you find difficult? Have you come across any particularly cringe-worthy examples of authors writing a different gender to themselves?
[coffee]
Jo Eberhardt is a writer of speculative fiction, mother to two adorable boys, and lover of words and stories. She lives in rural Queensland, Australia, and spends her non-writing time worrying that the neighbor’s cows will one day succeed in sneaking into her yard and eating everything in her veggie garden.
Thank you for this post big-time Jo.
I’m working on a story that has a rather large creep factor to it, one that might alter the plot if I can’t find a believable way to overcome it. My MC’s life is anonymosly saved, and instead of meeting her savior face-to-face she is told to explore virtual reality video games based on books that she discovers were really about her.
An anonymous writer has been fixated on her for decades, and I need to figure out if that’s too much creep to overcome and have a happily ever after.
James, if you can overcome that creep factor, you’ve got a winner! It sounds, though, as though your narrative so far has been driven by the plot. Is it possible that you need to ignore the plot for a while and get to know your characters more thoroughly? (I realize I am being rather presumptuous in giving advice here. Chalk it up to my runaway imagination. I should get back to my own WIP and leave yours alone….)
This is a provocative topic. I was once told by a (supposed) agent at a conference that men could not write women and vice versa. I thought, wow, you’d have to throw out half of Shakespeare and a whole lot of George Eliot–in fact, huge swaths of Western literature and probably of other cultural literatures as well. I haven’t taken the plunges you describe, but four of my novels–three of them published–had male MCs. My feminist friends were appalled that my first publisher used my initials and not my very female first name and that some reviewers took the bait and assumed the book had been written by a man. I did get called on some stereotypes of a certain kind of female character in the second book, but I consoled myself that I balanced her with a different kind of woman as a foil–and that neither was one-dimensional. I find that writing groups are wonderful for letting me know if I’m slipping into troublesome territory. Gender can be a minefield! Thanks for raising the issue. It’s not one I’ve often seen discussed.
Ah, that agent was so right! For proof, look no further than George Elliot’s masterpiece Suzy Marner, or Henry James’ Portrait of a Dude. And who can forget Agatha Christie’s famous detective Heloise Poirot? Literature is so much more believable when we authors stay in our lanes!
I love the analogy to trees, Jo. Great post!
My WIP has a young, female, outdoorsy park ranger. I’m not any of that, and writing her convincingly is a challenge. She contends with patronizing superiors; a romantic interest toward the handsome vet in town; and the stand-offish attitudes of the other women she regularly interacts with.
A steady stream of crises moves the story along, but there are times when I wonder if I’m just keeping her busy so I don’t have to delve into her inner life. Your post is encouraging. She’s gonna be into woodworking, I think. Fine Japanese saws and so on. Practical and contemplative.
Whatever you do, please don’t have her worry about bears and her period (see my comment below….. ;)
Excellent post, Jo. (He said while pondering the weight of his testicles.)
Timely too—for me, anyway. Getting ready to start on my fifth novel, but it’s my first one with a female protagonist. When I told my wife, she wrinkled her brow, peered down her shirt at her cleavage, and said, “But you don’t know the first thing about women.”
I’ll show her. I’ll show everyone! (With the help of this article, of course.)
Thanks again, Jo!
Back in the day, I was among a small band of men who wrote romance fiction under female pseudonyms. Not only was I male, I was a young male. Talk about your challenges.
Back in the day, romance fiction did not feature male POV’s. To write it, you had to write as a woman. Clothes as a woman. Sex as a woman. Men as a woman. The big cheat in romance fiction is that the hero and heroine are fixated upon each other, as if there is no TV news, no desk job, no tire rotation, no garbage.
Her-her-her, him-him-him, heat-heat-heat. Honestly, it wasn’t hard to write. That singular focus is shared (in your twenties, anyway) just different in the details. What I didn’t know about how women see things, research told me.
We’ll all human. Start there, but the differences do matter. It only takes looking at things another way for a little while. And hey, what’s wrong with that?
Hi Jo,
Although I think your piece is well written, I respectfully and adamantly disagree with this line, “People inhabit their bodies, but unless there’s a reason for them to be thinking about an individual body part, they generally don’t.”
In my younger days, I literally heard teens and women talk about body parts all the time. “My butt is too big.” “I’m getting fake boobs because mine are deflated from breast feeding.” “I look horrible in a bikini because of my boobs (or butt or stomach or whatever).” “My legs look like tree trunks.” “I need a boob reduction. These huge things are killing my back” “My skin is s pale. I need to go tanning.” “I’m getting a nose job.” I could go on and on…
You may be thinking this only happens in certain circles, and while I agree that it happens more in certain circles, I also believe that it happens more often that I even know in many circles. I’ve done it in particular about my boobs. I’m thin and not curvy. When I was a teenager, I looked through the Victoria’s Secret catalog and them by body, and I would literally think about the “size, shape, position, or movement of my breasts” a lot. And, in college my roommate had the same thoughts.
Just saying: Many women do think about their body parts for no good reason other than what society is trying to shove down our throats. In my opinion, that’s why the beauty industry is so HUGE.
I do agree that before wring about the other gender (or any subject one is not familiar with for that matter) it is important to research and interview multiple sources – always.
Kind regards,
Liz
Hi Jo,
I always enjoy your posts and this one being no exception.
I can’t think of an example as graphic as the ones you describe – but I have noticed that female writers writing male characters and/or male writers writing female characters don’t seem to do any research on how members of the opposite sex, talk.
For example, I recently read a romantic mystery and while the female characters were okay – the male characters sounded like a bunch of needy touchy feely spinsters. Sharing secrets and their warm squishy feelings. I found myself screaming throughout book, that ‘men don’t talk that way.’ But I’ve read books where the male writer has his female characters act just as unrealistically.
The funny thing is that it’s probably one of the easiest things in the world to research because unless you’re living in a monastery, there are hundreds of live examples of both genders in anyone’s life.
But I can definitely back you up – women do not think about breasts or lady parts unless there is some sort of problem. I would imagine it’s the same with men. Maybe the writer was confusing his own thoughts for those of his character?
I love this post, Jo. You have such a way with capturing the thorny questions that pop up while writing.
I’m currently struggling with my first story having a female lead, but fortunately the struggles (thus far anyhow) have not been with her gender. I have an intimate sense of her, though her perspective clearly differs from mine. But isn’t that often the case? I didn’t have personal experience with WWI either, yet for years I inhabited a fictional soldier who knew the front all too well. So I trust I can do that again with my dear Lindsay, and that she’ll set me straight should I venture too far from her reality.
Characters have a way of doing that, don’t they?
I love this post!!! Especially because I just finished a novel by a very well known (male) writer of thrillers in which his female main character ate salads whenever she went out for meals and also worried about the timing of her last period when she was out in the woods lest a bear be attracted to her menstrual blood (sure, yeah, an urban woman might be concerned about this but in my experience lots of women are better educated – and this was a smart, worldly woman – so what an opportunity to bust this overdone myth… Hey, maybe DougB who commented above could provide this public service through his female park ranger MC…).
https://theconversation.com/lionel-shriver-and-the-responsibilities-of-fiction-writers-65538
This is an interesting article on the topic. There was a minor sensation about it at the time. Basically Shriver made the point that unless we write about people of other genders, races and cultures we’re restricted to writing our memoirs. Someone else took exception to this observation and walked out and spread her disagreement in the media.
I recently realized my main ladies are completely awful stereotypes. My MC is a kickass street fighter with a love for knives, pretty dresses, and stories. Is my MC good enough, or too bad-girl stereotype?
Her love interest is a shy, timid girl who loves books, nature, and peace over violence. Can I keep my love interest true to her innocent form, or is it better to give her a “masculine” interest?
Nice article, but I would have preferred a list of tips or something. For example, how do boys react to crushes instead of girls? It’s well known that girls get mood swings during a certain time, but how do boys experience emotional imbalance during puberty? How does each gender deal with trauma(if their is a difference)? How do they cope with a sudden influx of responsibility? Life-threatening situations?
I actually need to know this stuff. My male character is going through this stuff but I’m muddling through the planning as best as I can while trying to stall these events. It’s a self-insert, in first-person, so a list of things would really help.