Gender in fiction

[Andrewauthor]

I offer my thanks to Nathan Bransford for his insight into the publishing industry and creating a vicious, cutthroat competition to throw in our two cents. I’d like to share my own thoughts on gender in fiction and even fiction AS a gender. With as few credible citations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation as possible.

In the first stages of revision of my work-in-progress, I discovered that I had written a fairly genderless character. With a few minor changes, my ghost/homicide detective could have gone from dead dude to dead dudette. My story was still in its infancy, long before the current stage of hair-pulling revisions in which changing my character’s choice of breakfast cereal would require a massive rewrite.

So, true to my work and not wanting to undermine the legitimacy of my art, I asked myself “Which gender would sell better?”

Secondarily, I asked myself if I even COULD write a female lead – would it ring true? Consider the character Ellen Ripley from the Alien movie franchise. She has been heralded as a prototype for the gender-role-breaking badass scifi (syfy?) lead. The most cited reason is that the character was written by men, for a male lead. They wrote a male starship captain that was brave and protective of his crew, but it was later decided that a female lead would best draw in the movie crowds.

I’d like to take this moment to strongly assert that I believe women can and do show those positive characteristics, and only posit that example as food for thought.
Another example is the controversy over who REALLY wrote some of Shakespeare’s stories. Many scholars and some random shmucks contend a woman wrote many of the plays. Some evidence for that is that people think that women write male characters better than vice versa and the Bard’s style is more like the former. Robin William’s (no, not THAT Robin Williams) book Sweet Swan of Avon is on this subject.

Author Neil Gaiman has aninteresting insight on gender in books http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/ ... ve_Genders. To sum up his words in a less eloquent, probably inaccurate statement: Books themselves have gender; they inherently feel like a boy-book or a girl-book. Subsequently, I decided “Well, I could make my character female, but I think my story is a boy-book.” Since then, my lead character has flowered into a fascinating, decidedly male protagonist.

Blogger SlushJunkie was kind enough to respond to my question on the subject thusly: “My advice - write for what YOU think works best for your story. Men and women work differently for each story, so go with what works best for you. If it's well written, someone will pick it up.” I think most of us hope that’s not too big an ‘if’.

So, in the parlance of this blog, “You tell me.” Do you write your own gender? Do you prefer male or female protagonists/does it make it easier to connect to the character? Does it matter to you?

[Terry]

Hey, I like this one. I'm a female writing a male protagonist. So this interests me.

Best of luck:)