Take it – or Give it—Like a Man

With few notable exceptions, most of our NovelMatters community is female. And on Patti’s excellent Movie Monday post, the esteemed Amy Tan discussed why she wouldn’t want to write in the voice of another gender.

One writer, Brian McKenzie on his blog, Superhero Nation sagely advised that it can be done, if you are bold:

Because everyone knows at least some males, we all have expectations (stereotypes) about what a male character should be like. So I would encourage any woman writing a novel or story about a male character to be bold. Don’t be afraid to show men acting or thinking differently than females… we’re not just women with short hair! The worst case scenario is that your guys are too stereotypically male, which is easy to fix. Beta reviewers can point that out for you. It’s much harder for a beta reviewer to circle a passage and say “this is too timid– I think this guy should be more masculine here.” So I urge you to paint in bold strokes, rather than worrying about offending men or looking unknowledgeable.

(How's that for bold?)

I’ve tried my hand at that. In fact, one of my WIPs is told from both a female and a male point of view. Thought you might like to see my first-person-male account of an amnesiac who awakens among the dead on the battlefield of Antietam:

Not many people have the privilege I have, or perhaps it is a curse, to remember one’s own birth.

Of course it is all preceded by the time of great emptiness, where there is nothing; and only later does one acknowledge the time of nothing, the time before which things must have existed, but which I cannot access.

So I speak of what I first know, the time of great blackness, so profound that it pushes on the eyesockets like fists, to prevent them from opening.

The sounds. The sounds of moaning. The sounds of screams, of cries for help, of cries for God, of cries for mother, father, lover, wife.

Of cries for the mercy of death.

But I am mute, for I do not know what to say.

And I feel the press of wet humanity around me, first warm, then cool and stiffened like starched clothes left on a line.

And I—

I yearn for breath.

(From The Mists of Antietam, copyright Latayne C. Scott)

Admittedly, this person doesn’t have to be male. But later in the novel as he gains consciousness, I have to give him maleness; because no matter how profound his memory loss, he hasn’t forgotten that he is a man.

At the risk of inviting unfavorable comparisons of my slender work to those of literary giants, I ask you for other examples of people you know who created memorable characters of a gender other than his or her own.

Thoughts?