I’m just back from ComicCon Honolulu, where I gave a talk on World Building. One of the questions posed at the end of the session was this:

How do you, a woman, feel that you can understand what it’s like to be a man, well enough to write from a man’s point of view?

I’m sure this question has come up many times among readers and writers. Here’s an expanded version of my answer:

It’s my job as a fiction writer to get inside the headspace of all sorts of characters. Writing other people is a job skill. If you feel you’re not empathetic enough to get inside the heads of characters not based on you, you’re not going to make a very good writer.

Beyond that, I think a question like this implies some flawed assumptions. First, that there is some universal trait, or complex of traits, that defines all men, and that this trait is more important than culture, age, sexual orientation, or anything else. Second, that only the fact of being a man gives you access to this knowledge. And third, that as a man you would automatically gain an empathetic ability to understand all other men well enough to write from their points of view no matter how different from you they might be—but presumably you will not be able to write successfully from the point of view of a woman!

That’s tremendously limiting, and I don’t think it’s true.

We are all human beings. We all share many aspects of existence, and those we don’t share, we can learn.

I’ve lived, worked, and played in the company of men all my life. Gentlemen, I’ve watched you, studied you, read your fiction, your essays, your autobiographies, talked to you, listened to others talk about you in a general sense, and considered cultural definitions of manhood from the point of view of myth and how those myths mesh with my observed reality. And you know what else? I’ve seen the cultural definition of “the American male” change radically just in my lifetime.

My conclusion? Men are interesting, complicated, variable creatures (just as women are!), but they’re not unknowable. Throughout my career I’ve written from both male and female points of view. Given that many of my long-time readers are men, I’m going to conclude that I’ve conveyed masculine viewpoints in a way that seems legitimate to them.

My novel, The Red, goes all the way with viewpoint. It’s written from a first-person male perspective. This isn’t the first time I’ve done this, but it is the first time I’ve done it at novel length—and it seems to have worked for readers.

Writing fiction requires us to get into the heads of characters who are emphatically not us. Those characters might be offset from us by gender, but is gender the only important difference we might encounter? What about other factors, like age, culture, experience, ability, historical era, or even species if we’re writing science fiction or fantasy? Unless you’re writing autobiography, you’ll always be writing about someone different from yourself, and that can be intimidating, but it’s a writer’s job to try.

Posted on: Sunday, July 26th, 2015 at 12:55 pm
Categories: Writing.
Tags: male protagonists, point of view