Gender and POV

Confession: I eat too much and hate exercise. It's amazing I'm only twenty pounds overweight.

Reading:

• The Van, by Roddy Doyle

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

Revising:

• "Dolly Hobbles"

I found it very difficult the first time I was called on to write a story from a female POV. It wasn't even in the first person. It was just... uncomfortable is the best word I can think of to describe it. I knew I was going to get it all wrong, that everyone was going to laugh at me, that I would reveal some sort of great error that would shame me for life.

As a result, the character became even more wooden than she might have been otherwise. It was from her POV, but I resolutely stayed out of her head.

I can tell you exactly when that started to change for me. As a way of learning to write in other voices, I joined a bunch of different forums one weekend. I created a "character" for each of them, and made sure to post only in that person's voice.

The only female character in the lot turned out to be the most successful. Part of it was because I liked the subject matter in that forum best, but I think it went deeper than that. I became friends with the other people there, and as I did, I put more and more of myself into her and her story. When good things happened in my life, they happened in hers. Bad things, ditto. They happened through the filter of the character, of course, but as time went on, that mattered less and less.

I was accepted without reservation, and after a while, I took that for granted. She was consistent, but still developed as time went on. After a few years went by, I gradually posted less and less, gave my excuses, and quit the forum. I did this not out of boredom, but because I had become such good friends with those people, and it pained me to keep lying. But I couldn't tell the truth, because I'd rather they remember her well than me poorly.

That experience taught me one thing--we all have the same motivations. We may act on them differently, or with different results, but the things we want out of life are the same: pleasure, security, fulfillment, peace, love, excitement. We also fear many of the same things too. And the whole trick to crawling up into another person's noggin is to find out how they react to what they fear, and how they pursue what they love.

Armed with that knowledge, I had no qualms about writing several stories from female POVs. And they've been well received, by both men and the lady types. I'm sure if I get something really wrong, someone will be glad to let me know, but if I do mess up, it won't be because I've forgotten that deep down, we're all human.

Damn that was clichéd. I feel like adding a dick or fart joke here at the end, just to balance it out.