gender through literary matters

[cacian]

should a writer chose his own gender to write his main characters and the rest is either one or the other. The reason for this is to allow for leadership of genders to prosper and ideas on how to manipulate /perceive the other gender.
To understand each other from a literary point of view is most important.
Or should we the do it the other way and write our lead character our opposites and see it works.
Either way we must follow our instincts.

The other question I have is this : Is there such a book written only in one gender for one where all characters are either one or the other but never both at the same time?

What say you?

[hillwalker]

I'm assuming the first part of your question is 'Does the main character in a story/novel have to be the same gender as the writer?'

The answer is obviously 'No'.

H

[cacian]

I'm assuming the first part of your question is 'Does the main character in a story/novel have to be the same gender as the writer?'

The answer is obviously 'No'.

H
Yes thank you hillwalker. What makes you say that?

[hillwalker]

Because there are no rules that require writers to make their main characters the same gender as themselves. Why ever should there be? It's like suggesting Thomas Hardy was wrong to write 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' or George Eliot was wrong to write 'Silas Marner'.

You seem to be getting 'hung up' on how or why we write instead of getting on with your writing.

H

[cacian]

Because there are no rules that require writers to make their main characters the same gender as themselves. Why ever should there be? It's like suggesting Thomas Hardy was wrong to write 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' or George Eliot was wrong to write 'Silas Marner'.

You seem to be getting 'hung up' on how or why we write instead of getting on with your writing.

H
This is my writing . Research is part of it.
It is not about rules it is about instinct and why we write.
I explained the reasons why one may approach writing through their own gender to break through human understanding of their own self.
I may not understand the masculine gender because I am not a he but i would begin to understand it from a writer's point of view because he took the time to write about it using his characters as male. Male lead characters written by men writers help the female gender to grasp what men are about and vice versa.
It is not rocket science it is literature. We emancipate and intellectualize understanding through reading stories and writing them.
I thought you of all people understood this.

when I write poetry i write what i know. I pass on what i have acquired through my understanding of life.
Poetry talks reality and changes prospectives and I like it because it is not about a he or she or a lead characters it is about everyone.
Stories are more focused and it is about a human against another. A writer tells his or her stories through the eye of a fictional character they get to make up.
All characters in stories should be about how to strive to succeed that way one can demonstrate that they could.

[cafolini]

Because there are no rules that require writers to make their main characters the same gender as themselves. Why ever should there be? It's like suggesting Thomas Hardy was wrong to write 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' or George Eliot was wrong to write 'Silas Marner'.

You seem to be getting 'hung up' on how or why we write instead of getting on with your writing.

H

Not a bad estimate of Cacian's being taken over by the spirit of a mule. LOL

[cacian]

Because there are no rules that require writers to make their main characters the same gender as themselves. Why ever should there be? It's like suggesting Thomas Hardy was wrong to write 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' or George Eliot was wrong to write 'Silas Marner'.


On the other hand no one really knows who Thomas Hardy was I never met him in person and the same goes with George Eliot.
They might have been characters in disguise who knows.
If you think of Jane Austen her main characters were female and their leads were male.
It makes sense. She saw her the woman with the characteristics and the flavours and the mens as the money providers. She wrote herself well in into her female characters because they all did have a happy ending type of stories.

[qimissung]

Well, Jane Austen's stories weren't all "happy." If you look closely at the ending of "Sense and Sensibility," it was more pragmatic than happy. I'm not sure what that has to do with your topic, though.

I think it would be a mistake to limit authors to writing only about characters that were the same sex as they were. Look at "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy, which is one of the most brilliant novels ever written. Even "Lolita" by Nabokov. He wrote compellingly, not just about a female, but a prepubescent one at that. I know there are many other examples, those are just two of the top of my head.

[Shaman_Raman]

should a writer chose his own gender to write his main characters and the rest is either one or the other. The reason for this is to allow for leadership of genders to prosper and ideas on how to manipulate /perceive the other gender.
To understand each other from a literary point of view is most important.
Or should we the do it the other way and write our lead character our opposites and see it works.
Either way we must follow our instincts.

The other question I have is this : Is there such a book written only in one gender for one where all characters are either one or the other but never both at the same time?

What say you?

Cacian, it's hard to answer because it's a loaded question. One, no an author can have the main character either gender they please. Should they pick there own gender because of some certain bias towards it? No, because a male author won't necessarily portray their male main character in a positive, or superior light, and vise versa. Maybe Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club shows female dominance, but J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, shows a humiliating joke of a man. And the novel version of Bourne Identity probably has two equally intelligent and contributing main characters, one a man and the other a woman. So it varies, but I don't think it's about manipulation or negative perception of the other gender.

To your other question, I'm sure there has been, but honestly I can't think of one at the moment. I can't imagine there never being an author that thought, "What if my novel had all men/women?" Whether or not it'd be of any value is an entirely different question.

[Shaman_Raman]

“This is the point. This IS the point, Taper, it's not bull****. I’m not just talking about my wife, I’m talking about my life. I can’t seem to get that through to you. I’m not just talking about one person, I’m talking about everybody, I’m talking about form, I’m talking about content, I’m talking about interrelationships. I’m talking about God, the devil, hell, heaven. Do you understand? FINALLY?”

[Lokasenna]

To turn the initial thought on it's head, some people use the quality of individual male/female portraits in an anonymous work to attempt to identify the gender of the author. Take, for example, Laxdoela saga - one of the greatest masterpieces of the Icelandic family saga. Unusually, the central character is a woman, and one invested with a profound, subtle and moving psychology. This has caused some academics to insist that it must be the product of female author, and indeed I even attended a paper last summer where one of the world's foremost academics in the field was attempting to argue they she may have identified three sisters who may have been the collective author of the saga.

To be honest, though, I'm not convinced. I don't see why a male author cannot be capable of writing a convincing female character, or vice-versa.

[hillwalker]

I may not understand the masculine gender because I am not a he but i would begin to understand it from a writer's point of view because he took the time to write about it using his characters as male. Male lead characters written by men writers help the female gender to grasp what men are about and vice versa.
It is not rocket science it is literature. We emancipate and intellectualize understanding through reading stories and writing them.
I thought you of all people understood this.

Did I suggest that I didn't understand your point? The question you asked wasn't about female readers gaining an understanding of the opposite sex by reading work written by a male featuring a masculine main character. It was - can a man write about a female character as effectively as a woman writer - or indeed, should male writers only write about masculine main characters (if I understand it correctly).

My answer still stands. I have written stories - even a novel - from the pov of a feminine MC. Was I misguided to even attempt doing this because I'm a man? I trust not.

H

[cacian]

“This is the point. This IS the point, Taper, it's not bull****. I’m not just talking about my wife, I’m talking about my life. I can’t seem to get that through to you. I’m not just talking about one person, I’m talking about everybody, I’m talking about form, I’m talking about content, I’m talking about interrelationships. I’m talking about God, the devil, hell, heaven. Do you understand? FINALLY?”

Yes I do. Haha. It is easy to write a bible when god is a man and the writer is just another one of the same. When however a lady is mentioned it is either a virgin or a prostitute. The extremes are well too extremes. Is the bible some some kind sanctions to biase one gender over another? I am not so sure.
The other mention is I am assuming is that the bible one race biased too. There are no mention multicultural ties. This is just speculations. I am read of the bible throughout.

[Delta40]

What about animals? In Watership Down I guess the author was right to make most of the bunnies the same gender as himself so yeah perhaps you have a point...except does a writer have the right to assume what it's like to be an animal regardless of gender?

[cacian]

What about animals? In Watership Down I guess the author was right to make most of the bunnies the same gender as himself so yeah perhaps you have a point...except does a writer have the right to assume what it's like to be an animal regardless of gender?

Hello Delta man has no place in animalship he is yet to ask for its permission to demission. I take offence personally when a human demoralise a subject such as animals ie talks animal with the idea of projecting himself through it. There is no knowledge to be had from such derogatory manner. It is most likely to be very offensive to the animal if it had spoken for now it does not. I must not presume i take advantage of those who have not the mean to compete along or against me. I reserve judgement on parole.
What there is a lot of cobblers however. Haha.
Anyway I think it is best to approach writing from a standing point of view where I the writer project my ideal through my gender. What I am left to play with I experiment by using it as a recoursive approach to acting reacting and finding.
I consider characters as toys puppets a writer invent to create an atmosphere of interactive play using what he/she knows, his knowledge of himself against of that he does not. That what is chemistry does in a lab it mixes and matches and see if and when comes up with something. It most likely to be successful if the solution does not burn spill and end up messing the rest of the experimentees. A writer is like a puppeter only with a pen and paper.
Wrting is a world play we all manifest in order to conduct our role hopes plays and hopefully get to somewhere we wish to be. Language is a world stage and the writer its conductor where he or she gets to musicalise over notes and pitches. That is all I think.
However I am not suggesting for a minute we may not approach writing through other genders au contraire we must do that after we have mastered our own and then the rest should fall into place.
All in all if a writer asks how should I start to write the answer should be start with yourself. Why not? ;)

[hillwalker]

:mad2:

H

[AuntShecky]

Forgive me if I have misinterpreted the original question, but yes, certainly any writer worth his or her salt should be able to create characters in either gender. Otherwise, the completed work would only cover half of the experience of the human condition, which is what literature is all about.

Granted, the history of civilization has been male-dominated; hence the majority of the literature produced reflects that unfortunate aspect of our social evolution. It's no surprise that so many of the examples of the "world's greatest literature," the highly-touted lists of "Great Books", the Western Canon, etc. were created by "White Male Europeans" [sic] who thought to include few or no female characters -- Moby Dick, for instance, Don Quixote and the hundreds of war stories which necessarily present characters of the male gender.

On the other hand, remember the earliest and perhaps greatest war stories of all time --The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid. Homer and Virgil, along with the Greek dramatists drawing on the same source material, created immortal male heroes, but they included spectacularly unforgettable female characters as well: Helen, Dido, Penelope, Cassandra, Electra, just to name a few.

Further along the line, Chaucer and Shakespeare could transverse the literary gender line with ease. What difference does it make whether Lady Macbeth was spawned by a male mind? This is what Keats meant by Shakespeare's "negative capability": "the ability to identify completely with his characters, and to write about them with empathy and understanding." (Oxford Companion to English Literature, p.689.)

Likewise, T.S. Eliot was aware of necessity of submerging the self (one's own personal history, presumably including one's gender) in order to create a work of art. We see this in a section of "The Waste Land," with the reference to Tiresias, "old man with wrinkled dugs," indirectly alluding to that mythological figure's seven-year stint as a woman after he'd been given the transexual operation --along with being struck blind --by a goddess. He doesn't appear in the poem by accident; Eliot employs several voices in the work, including several female ones.

The point is a writer can --and should--create characters of the sex opposite his or her own. The ability to do so stems not from personal experience but rather through a finely-honed active imagination, not to mention assiduous observational skills.

If the original poster feels intimidated about writing from the standpoint of the opposite sex, it's her perogative not to do so. But to assert that it can't be done by anyone else is flat-out misguided.

[cacian]

:mad2:

H
H this one is better : !:crash: and this one:rage:
if not
do you need an ice pack?:boxing_smiley:

[Delta40]

I can't be on this side of the world and not meet you!

[hillwalker]

I can't be on this side of the world and not meet you!

Good luck with that. Does your travel insurance include cover for unintentional murder committed when exasperated beyond belief by the indigenous population?

H

[stlukesguild]

Male lead characters written by men writers help the female gender to grasp what men are about and vice versa...We emancipate and intellectualize understanding through reading stories and writing them. I thought you of all people understood this.

You are assuming that everyone interprets things as you do... which I can quite certainly assure you is not so. Characters in literature are literary inventions... fictions. I cannot say that reading has led me to a greater understanding of women... or men.

All characters in stories should be about how to strive to succeed that way one can demonstrate that they could.

There are no "shoulds" in art.

I see no reason why the author/artist "should" limit himself/herself to characters based upon the writer's gender, race, nationality, gender preference, age, species, etc... any more than the author/artist should limit himself/herself to narratives/subject matter drawn from his or her everyday life. Art quite frequently employs fiction. As an artist I'm far more interested in painting women and fictional settings/narratives than I am in painting myself, my den crammed with books, or my daily drive to work. These things don't interest me in the least as a subject matter for art.

As others have suggested, there are any number of unforgettable female characters that have been created by male writers, including Anna Karenina, Lolita, Helen, Dido, Penelope, Cassandra, Electra, Lady MacBeth... and I might add Salome, Hester Prynne, the Wife of Bath, Scheherazade, Nana Coupeau, Emma Bovary, Madelaine de Maupin, Milady de Winter, Lulu (Wedekind) etc... If you find that you prefer or need to remain true to the reality of your own real-life experience... that is fine for you... but don't assume it is true of everyone else... or that it "should" represent some ideal of "best" approach to writing.

[cacian]

Good luck with that. Does your travel insurance include cover for unintentional murder committed when exasperated beyond belief by the indigenous population?

H
hillwalker night you're talking.What do you know about insurance? Pray do tell. ;)

[Delta40]

Good luck with that. Does your travel insurance include cover for unintentional murder committed when exasperated beyond belief by the indigenous population?

H

Lol. Don't worry, I'll make sure I'm heavily medicated on the day and let my smartphone translate the parts I don't understand

[cacian]

I can't be on this side of the world and not meet you!

Delta40 let's fix something.:)

[Delta40]

Let's trust to fate and the Underground

[jayat]

I agree with H and think that is once more a fake issue to deviate the main point: get on writing, "reams of it" if possible (paraphrasing S.King), what effectively and straightly may brings us to something (finishing a good story, a novel if we are lucky and rack ourselves brains on the blank pages, etc...)
However I consider the "how" is as importnt in literature as "what and why". A personal, effective, shooking even style could be considered the your best firm.
Deviating the main subject but, anyway...

[cacian]

Let's trust to fate and the Underground

Absolutely haha ;)

[AuntShecky]

Please allow me to reiterate:


The point is a writer can --and should--create characters of the sex opposite his or her own. The ability to do so stems not from personal experience but rather through a finely-honed active imagination, not to mention assiduous observational skills.

Or as the great Yogi once said: "You can observe a lot just by watching."

[cacian]

Please allow me to reiterate:



Or as the great Yogi once said: "You can observe a lot just by watching."


The point is a writer
This should read ''the point of a writer is'' to create what is not.


can --and should--create characters of the sex opposite his or her own.
Yes yes that we are all capable of . There is no doubt we can all do that. We are all able to create opposites because it is easy to copy what is not the same as us and so naturally we create our opposite ie characters of our opposite sex. That is an already established component of the human capacity to adapt.
What I am saying let's create our same because it is the most difficult one simply because we are not able to see ourselves and therefore studying ourselves by ourselves is a harder task. It is the typical easily said then done scenario.
So to go back to the OP I think writers need to delve into themselves and create their own counterpart. In order to explore fully who we are we are to imagine and that is the hardest bit. But there is a reward and that is to get to approach ourselves in a different manner and that is through words. Call it the eternal monologue only with writing.

The ability to do so stems not from personal experience but rather through a finely-honed active imagination,
IT is easy to imagine what we see and because we see it we distort because we do not understand what we see because we have not understood ourselves yet. catch24 meaning of life.

not to mention assiduous observational skills.
I think it not the place for a writer to observe. It is the place for a writer to write and think about or he or she is writing. The less observation and the better for it. That is my approach the less I know of others the more I know of me. ;)


Or as the great Yogi once said: "You can observe a lot just by watching."
I am not sure this is as assidious as it looks.
To watch is to entertain the mind with ideas that are not ours . To oberve is to see what is ours in comparison to what is not. In other words to observe is to compare our knowledge against another and if the findings are dissimilar then ours is. The observed irrelevant. What remains is our relevance that defines who we are. The more we stick to our guns and the more we stand for what we believe which ultimately makes us who we are. We may Unforgive errors but we talented for what is our knowledge. It is not to be omitted on the ground of watching au contraire it solidifies what we already know is right and makes us stronger for it.

[stlukesguild]

We are all able to create opposites because it is easy to copy what is not the same as us and so naturally we create our opposite ie characters of our opposite sex. That is an already established component of the human capacity to adapt.
What I am saying let's create our same because it is the most difficult one simply because we are not able to see ourselves and therefore studying ourselves by ourselves is a harder task.

So you don't think that literature/art has more than a few examples of strong male characters invented by male writers (or strong female characters invented by female writers) that have elements of the autobiographical or self observation?

[islandclimber]

Maybe all writers could wander far down the path of transvestism (or for the truly committed, transgenderism) so as to satisfy Cacian's authorial gender requirements, though I fear this would lead to much confusion...

I'm with Hill here. Responding to Cacian's questions is certainly akin to banging one's head against a brick wall.

[Steven Hunley]

Maybe all writers could wander far down the path of transvestism (or for the truly committed, transgenderism) so as to satisfy Cacian's authorial gender requirements, though I fear this would lead to much confusion...

I'm with Hill here. Responding to Cacian's questions is certainly akin to banging one's head against a brick wall.

I agree with both of the above on this. The question itself is open to too much interpretation to form a comprehensive answer.

[cacian]

Maybe all writers could wander far down the path of transvestism (or for the truly committed, transgenderism) so as to satisfy Cacian's authorial gender requirements, though I fear this would lead to much confusion...

I'm with Hill here. Responding to Cacian's questions is certainly akin to banging one's head against a brick wall.

Goodness mean no. LOL
I am only speculating. About men writers writing up male characters as if they have just walked out of a shabby miserable reality is not the kind of visual writing I am talking about. I am talking about writing our genders first in a different light. Consider this: I am a female writer and my MC is a female character and she will be written to do /act /say things that I would do in reality. I would only write her to execute what I would do and nothing else bit it has to be a polished reality otherwise there is no point in writing.
My female character would not for example kill because I in reality would not do it.
Then I would side her besides other characters of the opposite sex and make her act/appear/say/do things I would do in reality.
So to sum up I would not write up my MC to be the opposite of me but the same as me if and when given the chances to show up for the good.
In other words my female MCs will get to do and say all the things I wish to do and realise in real life. What I cannot have do say in my real life I will make my MCs characters do. In other words my characters live the dream for me. All the dreams I have that I may not achieve in real life they will be achieved in my stories.
I call it a kind of an achievement where whilst I am unable to achieve in the near future my stories will achieve it for me before I get there.

Writing is a discipline. One must learn to adapt to what is the norm and write about it as if it was.
I take from reality and then I twist it to become the non reality with a perfect measure that suits all.
It is not about how l live my life it is about how about how I want it lived. Discipline is about control let's exercise through writing.

[Shaman_Raman]

No offense intended, but if you have a concrete philosophy already in all of this, why pose it as a question in the first place? It just seems that all of our responses to the original thread are pointless because you have a set view on how you should go about writing your own gender and the opposite. If it's for the sake of some agreement, I see the logic behind expressing your unfulfilled dreams and aspirations in imaginary characters.

[cacian]

No offense intended, but if you have a concrete philosophy already in all of this, why pose it as a question in the first place? It just seems that all of our responses to the original thread are pointless because you have a set view on how you should go about writing your own gender and the opposite. If it's for the sake of some agreement, I see the logic behind expressing your unfulfilled dreams and aspirations in imaginary characters.
I ask questions because I feel they need to be asked.
Whatever answers maybe are for the good of reading.
The idea is to communicate with standing orders of different varieties and soupcon. For example I never know what my speculations answers are going to be untill I ask or pause a question. I do not come prepared with answers because I have the question. I cannot be doing both.

[Delta40]

Cacian I think part of the issue is that you're not articulate when you write. I wondered if you were:
A) ESL
B) dyslexic
C) semi-illiterate

A lot of what you write simply comes across as mumbo jumbo and it can be difficult to follow someone's line of thought if they are not making themselves clear.

[cacian]

Cacian I think part of the issue is that you're not articulate when you write. I wondered if you were:
A) ESL
B) dyslexic
C) semi-illiterate

A lot of what you write simply comes across as mumbo jumbo and it can be difficult to follow someone's line of thought if they are not making themselves clear.

It is a co mbination of a lot of things. I must write in short sentences. It is better. I think more then I can write and that is why in a lot of places I come across as that.
The other thing is I can't stand the keyboard LOL it does not like me. I have tried learning to type and it just does not work. LOL:p

[islandclimber]

Cacian, you pose the question here without thinking about it first; then, once others respond you finally get around to thinking about how you would answer it? That seems rather illogical. You don't seem to care about answers to your questions, it's as though you have some agenda to get across this very deterministic ars poetica you possess fiercely. You certainly seem to see art as black or white, no middle ground, absolutes are necessary. There's this strange bipolarity to your thinking.

You write above about how one can either write characters identical to oneself, or the opposite of oneself. That's incredibly myopic. Good characters often resides in the gray areas between, not the opposite, not the same, but an amalgam of diverse peoples one has encountered or imagined throughout life.

[islandclimber]

Cacian I think part of the issue is that you're not articulate when you write. I wondered if you were:
A) ESL
B) dyslexic
C) semi-illiterate

A lot of what you write simply comes across as mumbo jumbo and it can be difficult to follow someone's line of thought if they are not making themselves clear.

Mumbo Jumbo, a brilliant novel. I've always thought the Wolfster should read Ishmael Reed so as to see how his style of writing can be done well.

Cacian, you might want to read something by I.R. as well. Broaden your literary horizons. Dip into something not quite so safe and bright. The Freelance Pallbearers perhaps...