Men Writing Women: Why I’m Good at It. Am I Good at It? How to Be Better at It.

 

–By Michael Gerhard Martin

 

 

When I was an undergraduate writer-boy, I thought myself a Hemingway scholar. I carried a valise, and tried to take up pipe smoking and hunting and tweed. I drank hard and thought existentially, and wished piously for wormwood visions.

The well-thumbed copy of Papa’s Complete Stories in my valise was the Finca Viggia edition, after all, and while I still don’t know what Finca Vigia is, I knew at the time that it meant authenticity. The book’s broken spine and worn pages affirmed my own authenticity. I was going to be a writer. I was a writer. Look, world, at my valise, my fountain pen, my Finca Viggia edition, and comprehend!

Those among us not embarrassed by our twenty-year-old selves are likely slaves to ridiculous nostalgia.Hemingway is a writer that writers can learn from. I still revere “Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Killers” as two of the very best short stories in English. But at some point, I stopped defending him, because weak, plastic, or otherwise unrealistic female characters are flaws. And maybe the fact that women aren’t houseplants is something that wasn’t lost on me, even as an arrogant adolescent Hemingway worshipper. Badly drawn female characters signal an essential lack of understanding, or maturity, or empathy, or vision – those psychological qualities that serious students of fiction writing must cultivate. I think I came to write better female characters primarily for aesthetic reasons; I think that pursuit challenged me to examine my own privilege and the misogyny of my culture. Maybe I became a better writer because I became a better man, but I think the truth is I became a better man because I wanted to be a better writer.

One of my most important undergraduate mentors was a woman. She was tough and edgy, and she did not suffer fools. She thought it was way too easy to get into creative writing classes in my undergraduate program, and I was tired of many of the slackers and whiners and no-talent tourists who showed up in seminar after seminar. When she took a writer to task for laziness, I felt the toothache sweetness of schadenfreude. And when she praised my work, I knew she wasn’t bullshitting. My obnoxious adolescent arrogance was completely deserved.

She had a chip on her shoulder about male writers who write female protagonists – understandable, because so many of us do it so badly, and get famous anyway. She even suggested that maybe they (we) should not – that it was a kind of appropriation, like white writers writing Black protagonists, or middle class kids writing about homeless characters with names like “Old Granddad.”

Her offhand argument didn’t sit well with me. If Louise Erdrich – I read “The Red Convertible” in her class for the first time — could do boys and men so well, surely I could learn to render women who presented the satisfying illusion of wholeness and personhood we associate with well-drawn characters.

That teacher threw down a gauntlet that has haunted my practice for 25 years. You wouldn’t know it from looking at me but I am an obsessive perfectionist. I wanted female characters to be one of my hallmarks, instead of a weakness in my work.

One early success: my story “The Strange Ways People Are,” (about a woman providing end-of-life care for her cancer-stricken father) was a finalist for a Glimmer Train New Writer’s prize. The judges were women. All I’d done was listen closely to the pain and anger and resentment and heartbreak and love of someone close to me (who is definitely not my poor mother) and work it into a pleasing narrative structure of less than 3,000 words. But what if it didn’t win because of some terrible flaw in that character? Without feedback, who knows what goes on in the minds of judges?

Many years later, Lucy Jane Bledsoe chose my story “Shit Weasel Is Late For Class” for the James Knudsen prize. The narrator of that story is a boy, and the only girl in the story isn’t central to the conflict. But it is the story of a boy who is a “pussy;” also a “faggot” and an object of ridicule, a punching bag, and a victim of sexual assault.

That arrogant younger me, who thought things like gender politics didn’t matter because what is important is “the story” wasn’t (thankfully) trapped in amber. I hope I’m getting it right. I’m anxious to get it right, with that blend of altruistic aspiration and craven narcissistic craft-lust writers seem to share.

Boy writers: queer your gender. The rules and norms you might follow are man-made, hilariously arbitrary bullshit. Your characters are acting out their ideas about gender, not behaving “the way men and women do.” There is no “female species,” either – people who misuse that expression should be made to sit quietly during adult conversations. We’re not really different, except in the ways we have been programmed to think of gender as binary and immutable. Your characters represent people, not penises and vaginas. And when your female characters are inflatable dolls and wedding-cake angels, bro – you’re letting the world know something about you.

My three best readers are women – I don’t always agree with them, but I never make a move without them. So maybe my recent success is just the result of good editorial policy. “Your female characters are like inflatable dolls and wedding cake angels” is a valid, important piece of constructive criticism. Every story does not have to have women in it, and female characters may not always belong at the center of the action. But every character should seem like an actor, not a puppet.

I gave two readings recently that spun my head. The first was at the Salem Athenaeum, a surprise 10-minute spot at a packed cultural venue. My book wasn’t a week old, but brother — I was home! I read the beginning of a story I wrote about two teenaged girls finishing high school and trying to find their places in the world. The women who ran the show invited to headline the organization’s winter party, and one of them bought my book. The winter party is a formal with a Midsummer Night’s Dream theme. I’m thinking of myself as Prom King. Hemingway was a sensitive, emotionally crippled little boy who did everything he did to get attention. Just like the rest of us.

At Newbury College, West of Boston, I read from the middle of the same story, from a section that dealt with the protagonist winning an art contest and beginning to think about going to college. Most of the time, Q&A sessions are predictable; “Where do you get your ideas?” and “How much of this really happened?” This group asked more interesting, tougher questions. One was, “What are you hoping to accomplish by telling these stories?” Another was, “In just a few moments of your story, you created this community of women who support each other – imperfectly, of course, but their interactions are so vivid…. How did you do that, when so many men can’t, or don’t?”

It was one of the best moments of this award-winning, book-publishing, utterly fantastic year. It is something I’d wanted to hear for decades; it was an answer to something that kept me up nights, wracked with anxiety.

So I’d done it. I had 8 seconds to figure out how.

Sure, I have always had close friendships with women. I stuttered something to that effect. And I often didn’t like men – I hate sports, and I tended to get bullied in peer groups when I was a boy and a young man. I am close to my sister, and my wife is my partner and comrade-in-arms. I wish I’d said, “It’s amazing how far you get if you don’t describe them as flowers or food,” but that didn’t occur to me until later.

The most important thing I had to say on the subject, I think, was this: listen. I am a voyeur of human behavior and language. One of my first writing teachers told me to sit in public places and write down conversations I eavesdropped on, and I have been doing it for over thirty years. It’s dirty and invasive and awful, and if you don’t do it too, you’re totally missing out.

Write who you know, as well as what you know. Don’t make female characters that are as you want them to be. If you are using stereotypes, use them consciously, conspicuously, and ironically. More than that, really try to give every character at least the suggestion of depth.

Recognize how much like you they are, and how little like house plants.

Listen.

 

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A native of rural Pennsylvania, Michael Gerhard Martin holds an MFA from The University of Pittsburgh and teaches writing for Babson College and the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth. He won the 2013 James Knudsen Prize from UNO and Bayou Magazine for his story about bullying and gun violence, “Shit Weasel Is Late For Class.” His fiction has been shortlisted for the Hudson Prize, The Nelligan Prize, and the Iowa & Simmons Prizes, and his work has appeared in Bayou Magazine, The Ocean State Review, and Junctures. His first book, Easiest If I Had A Gun, was just published by Braddock Avenue Books.