I try not to post twice in one day (no one likes a blog hog), but I was just perusing the Bookslut archives and found this really excellent feature from a couple years back that I just had to share. In the article, Cutter argues that American women are better short story writers than American men. I know, I know, I was skeptical too. Whether or not his premise is true, though, he raises a lot of really great questions and links to some stories and authors that deserve a look. My favorite line from his article is this: “…strong sentences can make anything readable. If boxes of Wheaties had good copy, breakfast would be riveting.”
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June 30, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Joseph Grinton
I’m agog at your blog, Jess. You’re certainly not a blog hog.
I’ve noticed that women can be much more interesting and articulate than men in online forums. They’re often more sociable, more inclusive and more open. Writing stories is also a very social activity in so far as it comes from that same impulse to share our experiences and emotions, so I would expect women to be better at it than men. Maybe when it comes to the business of publishing, then men predominate, for reasons that have little to do with narrative talent.
I’ve just done a quick scan along my short story bookcase and (not counting stories in mixed anthologies) men outnumber women by 28-14. If I count only American writers then it’s 5-3 (the women are Lorrie Moore, Jhumpa Lahiri and Eudora Welty). But I’m not very good at counting and may have missed a few. If you include two Canadian writers (Nancy Lee and Alice Munro) then it’s 5-5.
I have to say, I find most male American writers very boring, which is why I only currently have 5 American men on my shelves. They are John Updike, Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Bowles and Richard Ford.
July 1, 2009 at 6:25 am
filthylogician
I think Cutter makes a brilliant point about the literary heritage of male authors in America. How can a male, especially a white male, not find his way into writing narcissistic, memoir-ish tales? Mailer, Updike, Hemingway, Roth – how do we get away from it? It might not even be a conscious decision to write self-centered narratives if the forefathers one reads habitually were all in that strand of writing. Women, naturally, not being bound by male narcissistic forefathers, never allowed this manner of writing to seep into their bones. Lucky them.
July 1, 2009 at 10:45 am
Joseph Grinton
Going back a bit further, what about Nathaniel Hawthorne? Last year I read a story by him called The Birthmark. It’s about a scientist who wants to improve his wife’s beauty by removing a birthmark from her face. It is a brilliant story with a remarkably modern resonance and not at all narcissistic. Hawthorne writes brilliantly about women I think.
July 1, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Jess
Thanks, Joseph!
Cutter’s premise can certainly be argued, and he seems to have hit upon a nerve that you both can relate to, but I fear it may be too restrictive to divide something as subjective as writing into gender lines.
July 1, 2009 at 7:41 pm
filthylogician
The sad thing about Hawthorne is that most young, male writers probably don’t look at him for inspiration and guidance. Tragic, really.
July 1, 2009 at 11:38 pm
Joseph Grinton
Actually I have always been interested in the gender issue. When I first started writing stories I often wrote in the first person from a woman’s point of view as I found it came very naturally. It took me a long time to feel confident about writing in the first person from a man’s point of view. I think it’s because when you are writing from the heart you reveal yourself quite fully to the reader and you have to be very comfortable with who you are in order to do that. I always find it interesting to see a woman writing as a man (like Iris Murdoch often did) or a man writing as a woman, because it reveals another facet of their psyche. I once submitted a story to a competition that was a first person narrative of a 17 year old girl. All entries were anonymous and I think the judges assumed I was a 17 year old girl. The story won first prize and I had to collect the prize in person so I was a bit embarrassed about it. They had hired an actor to read out the winning story and he refused to do it because he said he couldn’t read in the voice of a 17 year old girl. Since then I’ve always written in the third person or as a male narrator, just in case. But I haven’t entered any more competitions either. In fact that’s been my only literary success.
July 2, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Jess
That’s pretty funny. Now that I think about it, I did the same thing — when I started writing stories a few years back, most of my protagonists were men. Now, I write more from the POV of a female, or from an omniscient third person, I guess. Very interesting.