I have learned to do many things on my own. Although I may not like some of the things I have tried to master, sometimes we don't have a choice. In the back of my mind, I can hear my mother's pragmatic voice wanting me to be independent to handle a struggle.
It may be sexist but when I have computer problems I have a few men I call on. Trying to insert an image and upload text by adding Paypal buttons shouldn't be too difficult, but it was an obstacle. Today my usual helpers couldn't help, so I'll continue with the problem tomorrow.
Ordinarily, I wouldn't put off my task for another day, I'd stay up until the problem is resolved like a dog with a bone. But as I see it, I can write this post and at least feel I accomplished something TODAY.
I hate to waste a day going in circles, like a dog trying to bite its tail, which brings me to my topic—thinking about the differences between men and women.
My dog references in this post are because despite the difficulty I still have my faithful friend Coco that looks at me as if I'm the best thing on earth.
Now back to men and women.
I’ve always enjoyed writing women characters, particularly women narrators. There’s an instinctive connection between us, a shared voice and vision. Once I’ve imagined my women narrators, I’m able to slip into their psyche. I understand where they’re coming from, and what they want, even if I myself place them in a scenario that I have never been in. Most of all, I can feel in my bones the way a woman feels, whether it’s when she discovers that her best friend is having an affair, when her husband is suddenly killed, or when she falls in love with a man she knows her family will never accept.
Men, on the other hand, have been more of a mystery to me, and in the beginning, I was satisfied depicting them through my women narrators. “Write what you know,” I said to myself, and for a while, it worked well. But writing what we know, though a good rule for beginning writers, can become restrictive. I wanted to challenge myself by writing from multiple perspectives. This is certainly the case in my latest novel, Old World Glory. In this book, which follows the life of one man, I was so close to his character, that I only saw one side of him. I felt it was important for the reader to see him, additionally, through the eyes of another man in his life, a friend, a Journalist to whom he narrated his life. This I believed, would bring out a number of ironies in the book.
Being born into a male-dominated family, I have spent my life with possibly more if not equal amounts of men than I have women, but that doesn't mean I can take on their personas. Men have been good friends to me but that doesn't mean I'm in sync with the way they think. To create a male narrator, I had to do a lot of preparation. I used four methods: reading, research, recollection, and review.
The four Rs-- Reading, Research, Recollection, and Review—helped me create male characters that were believable.
I don't feel I achieved the smoothness of taking on a man's voice in Old World Glory. I need more refinement in that area, and perhaps in another post or short story, I'll challenge myself by stepping out of my narrative comfort zone, by doing more research, and by reviewing because just like my computer ails, I'm determined to cross this barrier and master it.
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