Young Writers Society

So, I've written a novel called "In Secret Places". The main character is Mary, a teenaged girl. The POV is first person.

Do you think it's strange that I'm a male author and I'm writing from the perspective of a young woman?

Advice and tips are very welcome. Thanks!

Short Answer: No.

Long Answer: Artistic Perspective Drag has been going on for centuries. Everything from Authorship to falsetto-singing males to Shakespearean actors playing female roles--it's all there, and it's usually contested by the closed-minded, which is normal for all sorts of junk in the world.

As far as writing goes, I'd say writing mainly a female perspective is no different than writing a male perspective. Understand that a character is a character, no matter which sex they are. Male/female is a matter of anatomy, and not personality. The implicit shame that comes with cross-sex writing stems from the idea that there is a major behavioral difference between every member of the male sex and every member of the female sex, which boils down into a whopping generalization.

What interests me is why you ask. If you personally think it's strange, then I suggest you scrap the project until you're comfortable with it.

Hmm... good points Lumi.

I don't think it's strange--I think I'm worried about potential critics, but now you've reminded me that, as a writer, I should write to please and express myself, not critics.

I think I'm also reluctant because I fear I'm portraying women in an awkward, offensive, or unrealistic light. But, as you've pointed out, that comes from the idea that there are major differences in the behaviors of men and women.

I have actually heard a story of a male author writing about his personal experiences and submitting the story to a magazine. He got notes back saying it was "too feminine" (because of the language used and emphasis on feelings), yet reflected his mental state at the time.

This little anecdote highlights how there are only assumed stereotypes for "male writing" and "female writing". Even if there are some biological difference in the brain, you still write a character as a character. Not a collection of stereotypes.

I concur with the above people. A character is a character is a character.

However, I do have one thing to add. Not everyone can pull off writing a person of the opposite sex, or a person of another race, etc. Normally, it's because they do just make them a walking, talking stereotype.

Other times it's because they forget. They forget that different people have different walks in life. A woman isn't less than a man. A man isn't more than a woman. Vice versa. A woman could write a man, a man could write a woman. But we live in a mostly xenophobic world. There are sexists, racists, homophones, and all other sorts of haters. If you're a man writing from a woman's point of view, you have to realize some things will be very different, not because she's a woman, but because of what her society thinks of women.

If she's not gender-typed, she might get slurs thrown her way. But even if she acts "correctly," her life won't ever be quite the same as a man's.

After all, where I live, women are, in general, paid only three-quarters of what men make. They are expected to be pretty and docile and motherly.

A woman character, set in the world I live in, would have to choose how to respond to this. She would be shaped by this.

That's ignoring the big ones, too. Pregnancy. Childbirth. Sexual violence. Three things pretty specific to women, even the latter though it unfortunately also happens to men. You tack on periods and a different body type (in general), and stuff gets interesting. Heck, some women are more prone to certain illnesses--dysautonomia, eating disorders, breast cancer, etc. (That goes for men, but it's just something to take note of if you haven't.)

So, yes. Write your character like you'd write any other character. You probably know how important backstory is. You have to realize that you could have a man and woman's backstory be exactly the same, but because of the culture they live in, how they are in relation to it could be completely different.

So, yeah. Anyway, I hope that all was pretty coherent. I'm an insomniac, but I'm trying to be a helpful one. Good luck with your writing endeavors.

Lumi's response is brilliant. But to jump off his response and into the liberal arts/humanities major mumbo-jumbo with which I spend my academic career:

Gender is a construct. It's all made up on all levels of society and has incredibly little biological basis. It varies between cultures and subcultures. It's reinforced and recreated in everything. But most importantly, it's all made up. It's socially and culturally made up, sure, and breaking free of it is a pain, because we've all been conditioned since birth (or arguably before) into acceptable behaviors for boys and girls, girl colors and boy colors, what masculine is and what feminine is. Think of it like all the talk of how the media determines what beautiful is, but to the extreme, and not just limited to the media, but everything and everyone.

So all that Bologna Sandwich about needing to know how women (or men) think or act, about women being impossible to figure out or men being impossible to understand... constructions, generalizations, reinforcement of constructions, etc. etc. etc.

When it comes down to writing, it's as the others above me have said. It's about knowing your character as an individual. You don't have to know "how women work" in order to understand how Mary works. I've read quite a few novels where the male writers try to unravel the (constructedly) "unfathomable" of womenkind and end up with female characters that seem more like "female" stereotypes picked from a catalog and glued together than that of an actual person. The same goes with female writers writing male characters--reliance on stereotypes. The same goes with male writers writing male characters and female writers writing female characters.

Using stereotypes and reacting to sterotypes = not the way to go about characterization. And thinking about your character as a member of one gender over the other rather than as a person first is a recipe for trouble.

That said, it is important to understand the constructions of gender. What's socially expected of a male, of a female, of a female when interacting with a male, of a male when interacting with a female, and all down the line. You need to understand the culture you're writing about and all its facets, and how your character fits into that, both consciously and subconsciously.

In modern American society, this is easier to see with regards to males, because a "masculine" female is far more acceptable than a "feminine" male. I know in one conversation I studied in class, much of it consisted of the males in the group asserting their masculinity. In fact, most of the worst insults you can direct at a male in American society are attacks on his sexuality or masculinity. (In contrast, the worst insults against women are about a woman's sexual activity, which reveals the "ideal" women to be one who doesn't have sex too much or too little.)

I got sidetracked a bit there, but it's important as you write any character to know the social expectations with which that character is faced. On one final note, I'll mention that all this varies between situation. A person might not being trying to affirm herself as feminine in Context A, but when she's in Context B, meeting her boyfriend's parents, she might want to be on her best behavior and conform to all the highest standards for a women, whatever the guy's parents believe that to be.

Oh, and lots of fun arises when people have different constructions. This gets used a lot in stories, usually with a macho male encountering some tomboyish female and scoffing, "Girls can't fight!" only to be proven wrong (soooo out. dated.). But what if the boyfriend's parents were hyper traditional, and your character more modern, and her attempt to assert herself as an intelligent young lady go over wrong? (Also outdated.)