I completely agree. On all your points. As human beings, most of us live and interact with people of every gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed and color, and if—as the observant chroniclers all good writers must be—we witness and retain the information, the perspective, we gain from those interactions, we have a wealth of detail and insight with which to create and infuse characters who are not “like us.”

The “male mask”?? For God’s sake, men have been writing about women since time immemorial, so the purported conundrum of the reverse becomes its own form of creative sexism!

Like you, I believe we can learn a lot about our own gender, our own female proclivities, by climbing inside the thought mechanics, the emotional bent, of men. They are as varied, as individual, specific and nuanced, as women, and getting beyond stereotypes and generalities to dig deep into the male psyche can offer a rich and illuminating foundation for powerful narrative.

I’ve explored this arena as well. My second novel, HYSTERICAL LOVE, is written completely from the male perspective. It’s a story gleaned from a funny, touching anecdote shared with me by a man, so there was never any question it would be told from a man’s point of view… which I thoroughly enjoyed exploring! After it came out, certain interviewers asked the same question you’re analyzing in this piece, to which I always replied some form of the following: “I have five brothers, a son, a husband, countless male friends, worked intensely with men, even spent years on the road in rock bands… I got my male bona fides!” And really, what woman doesn’t? If we’re paying attention to the world around us, a place FILLED with men, we should be able to write from a man’s perspective as expertly as any character whose persona, drives, personality traits, etc., are different from our own.

As for crossing cultures, while there may be some merit to Franzen’s point about not being able to write a black character without having been in love with someone of that ethnicity, I largely disagree. Any good writer driven to get beneath the surface of his/her characters does so by using tools of observation, awareness, listening, engagement, empathizing, and yes, experiencing. Many good writers have written about characters with whom they’ve had little personal experience, relying instead on research and all the above mentioned tools… which can get you to the heart of things pretty quickly.

There are also “sensitivity readers,” editors and readers of the culture about which you’re writing who can go through your work to clarify that you’ve stayed true and authentic to that culture’s embodiments and expressions. My current novel, A NICE WHITE GIRL, is written in third person but through the lives of both the white female protagonist and the black male protagonist, and while my own personal experiences, research, and observations left me confident in how elements of the culture of which I am not a part are depicted, I have engaged the services of a “sensitivity reader” to confirm that.

And, in some way, with my “male book” I did the same thing. Many of my pre-publication readers were men. They gave me all the clarification I needed to know their gender had been ably and authentically captured… even the parts where they blundered around with the women in the story! 🙂

It all comes down to perspective and creative urge. We must write about what moves us to write. If a man’s perspective best tells the story we’re moved to write, our only obligation is to write that story the way it is best told.

Thank you for an excellent piece.

I actually think, as you suggest, that the point of storytelling is expanding our experience, and putting ourselves (as storytellers or as listeners) in someone else’s shoes is exactly what this is all about. Placing us in that unknown place teaches us that we must not be afraid, that there are always connections, that there is no real ‘other’.
Personally, I’m a bit scared of writers who think that there are characters we should not write. There might be characters we don’t feel like writing, but that’s a different thing.

I’m an Italian woman living in XXI century Italy, writing an undying spirit incarnated into a black man living in 1926 Chicago. It was scarying at the beginning, but I learned to know my character and love him.