The Gender Gap

Is it over-ambitious (or to presumptuous) for a man to write about a female character or a woman to write about a male protagonist?  Maybe subconsciously I’ve thought so myself, as I have sometimes found myself praising people in my writing class for pulling it off, as though it were something particularly difficult to do.  Perhaps each of us is jealous of our own gender and we think that our particular makeup and psyche is too complex for any but the initiated to understand.

It's an issue that interests me at the moment, as the book I am writing centres on a man in late middle age, although the feedback that I have had so far is not that he it's not manly enough, but that he is too old!  (Note to self - subject for future blog: are the lives of the elderly a proper subject for fiction?  Discuss with reference to Prospero, Jolyon Forsyte,  Casaubon etc) It seems to me that gender colours experience, but that ultimately experience is universal and trancends gender. Grief is grief and joy is joy and hope is everlasting, whether you are a man or a woman. Writing about someone of the opposite gender is probably more accessible than writing about someone who lived 400 years ago, as at least there are subjects on hand to ask. I don't think you should curtail yourself as a writer for fear of failure.  If it stretches your imagination to write about someone who is in prison, or sailing single-handedly around the world, or (thank you Carson McCullars) a deaf mute, then you should go right ahead, with this proviso -- immerse yourself in the practical research as much as you can; find out all the relevant information even if you end up discarding most of it; more importantly, immerse yourself in the emotions of your character - grief/joy/hope etc - remembering that the alchemy of fiction consists of turning the universal into the particular…