Writing What You Don’t Know

I remember when J.K. Rowling’s cover was blown as also being crime author Robert Galbraith when one critic who’d actually reviewed the book at the time it was published, in apparent ignorance of the author’s true identity, remarked that the ‘male’ author/narrator had an unusually attentive eye for women’s fashion.

Without the chase of the literary whodunit over Robert Galbraith’s real identity, it’s doubtful whether the passing observation about the author’s apparently unusual male eye would have been of any great significance — it may have been a clue that an author might have been writing under another gender. But it could also plausibly be explained if a male author had been particularly diligent in his research on female fashions — or may even have had a keen interest in the subject.

In general I’m quite sceptical about gender biases in writing being  innate.  The pigeon-holing of male and female writers (and readers) into particular genres is probably a result of marketing that plays to rather cliched and old-fashioned societal expectations.  Nevertheless I do sometimes develop a hunch about anonymous writers’ genders from pieces of journalism or non-fiction but this impression forming way be deliberate in terms of the markets the writing is targeting.

Also remember that J.K. Rowling was published under her initials rather than Christian name of Joanne because it was thought that Harry Potter’s original target audience of older boys would be put off by a woman author’s name. But that doesn’t change the fact that the books were written by a woman, whether disguised or not, and it makes the point that plenty of female writers enjoy stereotypically male subjects like horror, fantasy and the more gory end of the crime spectrum. Certainly some of my fellow female MA students embraced these genres and at York Festival of Writing last year I met Sharon Bolton in a workshop whose novels have titles like Blood Harvest and a reviewer describes as filling every sentence with menace.

That said, It’s probably less common for books by ‘male’ authors to enter traditionally ‘female’ territory — stories overtly about relationships, family and romance. The inverted commas highlight that the name on the book may give a misleading or incomplete impression of the writer — there are various stories about how some very successful commercial genre romance writers are men with female nom-de-plumes and there are examples of books written from a female point-of-view, like S.J. Watson’s Before I Go To Sleep  where the gender of the writer is not made explicit.

Of course explicitly male writers do deal with emotional subjects, which are fundamental to the human condition, such as relationships, families and, to cite a notorious female stereotype, shopping. However, it’s often done under the cover of a concept or genre that overlays the underlying emotional themes — such as humour, crime, sport, even war. the Plenty of female writers also write about human relationships in a less-direct way but it seems to be true to say that there’s no direct male equivalent of chick-lit — so noticeably that it was the subject of a Radio Four Today programme item earlier this year.

As mentioned in a previous post, I joined the Romantic Novelists’ Association New Writers Scheme so I’m possibly in that small number — I’ll find out if my work is romantic enough when I send my manuscript off to be read by their romance expert readers!

These questions made me wonder if debate if I had biases built into my own approach to writing. Would I be as lucid as Robert Galbraith in describing the fashions worn by my female characters? I’m fairly sure the answer would be ‘no’.

That’s not to say I can’t imagine what my female characters would look like or that I’m unobservant in real-life about women’s appearance — it’s mainly that, as a male who’s mainly only ever bought men’s clothes, I haven’t acquired the relevant vocabulary. The fact that I haven’t said I exclusively buy male clothes is because I’ve bought presents and the like on occasion — not that I have a penchant for buying the odd bit of frilly lingerie (sorry to disappoint anyone who might be looking for pictures but if other people want to do that, then, of course, that’s all fine by me.)

And there are other areas where I’ve sometimes laboured in coming up with a description for the same reason — I haven’t been exposed to the right vocabulary. Fragrance is one example. About eighteen months ago I went to an excellent Love Art London event at Angela Flanders perfumery in Artillery Row in the City where fragrance expert Odette Toilette (she’s real, honestly!) matched fragrances to some well known pre-Raphaelite paintings.

It was an excellent event — and I was well in the minority in gender terms — but made me realise how hard it was (for me anyway) to try to describe aromas and fragrances in words. But smell is such a crucial sense that it would seem more than worthwhile to make the effort to try and learn how to describe it in an evocative way and I made a modest step in that direction by buying a book on how fragrances are created.

Are there any similar gaps in your experience that you feel might show through in your writing and, if so, I’d be fascinated to hear how you overcame them.