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.

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A couple weeks ago I blogged about a new novel in the early stages of development, and the frustration of coming up with a coherent plot. I’m happy to report I did come up with a nice plot skeleton that I can definitely work with, but there was another question I needed to answer after that: what point of view to use?

I wanted to write the story in first person. My initial conception of the novel suggested first person, so I sat down and wrote the opening chapter—and I didn’t like it at all. Partially, this was because I didn’t feel like I had the character’s voice right, but more importantly there was a structural issue of how and when to introduce information.

After experiment and consideration, I realized that if I opened in the main protagonist’s point of view/first person, he would either have to withhold key information to maintain the intrigue, or I would have to give up on intrigue and engage in lots of info-dump to get the reader up to speed. Of course neither option was acceptable.

So I re-wrote the opening from the point of view of another character, and I think it works much better. So it looks like it’s going to be third person, multiple viewpoint, which is what I’ve used for most of my novels.

In contrast to these struggles, last week I outlined a short story and then set out to write it—in first person. I was deep into the story before I realized that I hadn’t even thought about what point of view to use. The story simply demanded first person, and in this case it worked out fine.