Somewhere in her book of advice for writers, Starting from Scratch
I thought this was challenging, to say the least. Who doesn’t want to be a mature anything? Who wants to believe they’re not already mature?
So I tried a couple things. For one, I made the protagonist of Crossed Wires a woman. I also did a handful of short stories from a woman’s POV.
“The Iron” is one of those stories.
It also is one of those stories which has been workshopped and revised to within an inch of its life — some would say beyond, probably. Agent X (whom I spoke of here) hated one element of the story, which unfortunately was the central element: a steam iron’s place in a position of importance in a story about a married woman.
(Agent X’s point, as she explained it, had something to do with the iron as a symbol of the oppression or outright enslavement of women, and hence an unsuitable vehicle as an object of a wife’s wonder. Something like that, anyhow.)
As you will see, the steam iron in question has many features unlike those of ordinary appliances. Hope you like reading “The Iron” — regardless of your (or the author’s) sex. Here it is.
Update, 2008-10-08: Thanks to Marta’s gentle prodding in the comments on this post, I finally managed (thanks, Amazon!) to find exactly how Rita Mae Brown’s Starting from Scratch addresses this subject (emphasis added):
You must create men who love women and women who love men or your books will be lopsided. In the beginning of everyone’s work the dice are always loaded toward one’s own sex or sex preference. Learning to unload those dice, to throw the bones honestly, is what maturity as an individual and as a writer is all about.
marta says
I’ve written scenes from a male point of view. This November I’m going to try to write my NaNoWriMo novel with a man as the lead. We’ll see how that goes.
But couldn’t the same be said of a young person writing from an old person’s pov? Or a working class person writing from a aristocrat’s pov? One religion writing form another? Democrat from a Republican? A person with a happy, stable life writing from a miserable, mentally ill pov? The list is endless. I’m not sure crossing genders is the most difficult.
Now I’ve got to give the kiddo his bath, but I’ll come back to the story.
John says
@marta – Brown’s point may have been something like: Of all the divides which separate one character from another, none is more basic than gender; therefore, if you can’t master the expression of THAT difference, you’re just tinkering and avoiding the really hard problem.
Or, as I said, something like that. Of course, until I can get my hands on the darned book and look up the passage in question, I probably don’t have any business making her points for her.
(God help them — and me — if 10 years from now, somebody vaguely remembers something I said here and attempts to construct a mini-philosophy from it. :)
marta says
Hmm. I still don’t know if I agree that gender is the most basic divide. I mean, few people seem surprised (in my experience anyway) if a woman writes a make character well. But they always note if a man manages to write a female character well.
For some people gender may not be the issue–it may be race. Again, I don’t think it is as difficult for a person of color to write accurately about a white person as it is for a white person to write about a person of color.
Well, I’m rereading your comment and thinking okay–maybe you mean gender is the first difference to master? I don’t know. Perhaps the biggest problem just depends on where one’s prejudices are.
John says
@marta – I think we actually agree. (But heck, that’s not saying much — I agree with people as easily as a lot of folks pick things up with their right hands. :)
Here’s my take on what Rita Mae Brown was saying:
Gender is the one difference that’s actually objectively measurable and yields a binary, either-or result. Either you’ve got the Y chromosome or you don’t. (I’m not speaking at all about gender ROLES, btw, although Brown probably wasn’t so literal-minded about it.) All the other differences come down to degrees — to “truthiness” — and to, well, preference for lack of a better word.
In these terms, then, it can be framed something like, “If you can’t work out what it ‘means’ to be different in this absolute way, how can you ever hope to address more nuanced differences like race, age/generations, good-vs.-evil, and so on?”
The urgency of finding my copy of the book grows daily!…
AHA: this was so obvious — all I had to do was go to Amazon, look up the book, and use the “search inside” feature. I’ll update the post with what it says.