No less a luminary than Roald Dahl said that writing for children was the hardest sort of writing there was. He was also of the opinion that women made better children’s lit authors. I don’t remember his reasoning. It was included in a forward he wrote to “Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories”. I have it somewhere but like the vast majority of my books, it’s packed away awaiting our move this summer. How wonderful it will be to unpack all those boxes and reacquaint myself with treasures which have been invisible for over a year. Everything will seem like a present.
As I bob around the ethernet at various blogs and on Twitter, I find myself wondering at the numbers of female YA and MG writers compared with the male. It appears that in this field at least, women are the majority.
Not only that, but some of the biggest successes in the genres have been penned by women (JK Rowling, Stephenie Meyer for example)/ And yes, there are also Philip Pullman and Anthony Horowitz and Jeff Kinney, and Rick Riordan, and good old RL Stine and countless others. But maybe the comes-out-of-nowhere-and-completely dominates-pop culture- and -the- public- imagination- stories belong to the women.
On Twitter I follow many female YA authors. Like a huge number of them. It makes sense that when it comes to teen-girl-centric-with-a dash-of-romance, these oeuvres are largely penned by people who remember what it was like to be a teen girl. I guess.
But look at the Golden Compass‘s heroine Lyra who was conceived by a man, or John Green’s character Alaska,
and how about Libba Bray’s tortured Cameron in her current novel Going Bovine?
I defy anyone (male or female) to write so acutely and accurately about the experiences both real and fantastic endured by a teenage boy. She totally nailed it.
And traditionally it seems that writers excel when they write from the point-of-view of the sex opposite to their own. Why? Ummm….
My first book featured an 11 year old boy. I never meant to write from a boy’s POV. Always believed that I would write adventure stories for girls, but that’s not what came out of me. It was Feltus and he demanded to have his story told.
So I don’t know. One could say that fantasy has always been a man’s game (Tolkien, etc….) but that would be forgetting Ursula K. LeGuin, and Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Anne MCCaffrey and Madeleine L’Engle, and that’s just stupid.
Any thoughts? I’d love to hear in particular from male writers who are writing from the POV of a female and/or delving into the paranormal YA genre.
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8 thoughts on “Are Women Writers dominating YA and MG?”
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Jo,
I think as writers we should never shy away from attempting to reproduce any character, however distant or alien. The main characters in my YA fantasy novel, for example, are female and I’m not. It was what suited the story. Writers of SF/fantasy need to be able to write from the perspective of alien/magical beings, so hopefully the other gender of the same species shouldn’t be too much of a stretch!
No, I agree with you Simon. The character comes to you and you write it. But I did wonder about women writers dominating the genre. What do you think about that? Or Dahl’s comment that women make better kid’s lit authors?
Jo –
I have noticed exactly the same thing, during my twitter & blog wanderings. It may be that many of my online YA/MG writer friends are women, and a lot of their writer friends are women, but it’s probably no coincidence.
As for writing from the POV of the opposite sex, you make a great point. It would seem that JK Rowling shares quite a lot in common with Harry Potter, so she seems to imbue him with many of the same values and tendencies that she has. But I also think that with some notable exceptions, writing from the POV of the opposite sex can be no different than writing from the POV of any character entirely unlike yourself. If you’re good at it, you can pull it off without making the character a stereotype. You’re exactly right – how alike is Philip Pullman and Lyra? How alike is Suzanne Collins and the horde of awful people in The Hunger Games & Catching Fire?
Great post!
Jo,
It’s an interesting question to raise. I’m sure someone must have done research.
Is it possible there’s some nurturing instinct at play? You very rapidly get into gender-stereotyping with suggestions like that!
I’ve actually found that all writing tends to be dominated by women, not just YA. Thinking back to writing courses and groups I mean : women have almsot always vastly outnumbered men. Why should that be? Prior to the 20th century one reaon was that women weren’t “allowed” to express their talents via any of the formal professions but could make their mark via writing. But these days?
Simon.
Now that I think about it, most writing conferences (SCBWI, BEA) that I’ve been to, as well as the small number of writing courses I’ve taken were dominated by women. Is it just my perception, or are more of the literary agents and/or editors who deal with YA/MG female? I focus far more on childrens’ fiction editors & agents, so it may be well beyond this area.
Thanks for commenting Jay and Simon.
I think that one of the characteristics of a good writer (like Rowling, Pullman, et al) is that they create characters that live and breathe on their own and allow the reader to forget that they are reading fiction at all. The creator of the world is forgotten completely. And perhaps being able to imbue a character no matter what gender or whatever with realistic attributes including strengths and weaknesses is another mark of an able and talented author. We are all in essence observers and writers pay more attention than most.
And what we don’t know or experience directly we can make up.
I certainly agree that there’s few men at writing conferences, and far fewer who are writing from the POV of a female. I’m a male writer and my first book is narrated by a 17 year old girl. I struggled to “get it right,” but at the time I was working as a psychologist in a girls residential center, which helped. I can only think of a few examples of really great female characters written by men. And the ones that come to mind seem to be more like intrepid adventurer/explorer girls (Pullman’s Lyra or Scout from To Kill a Mocking Bird). This isn’t a criticism, because they’re amazing characters and still seem real to me even years after reading. But it’s curious, this business about who writes for whom. I know the kids who read don’t particularly care, so long as it’s engaging.
Thanks for commenting, Shawn! It’s well-known that the publisher felt that the first Harry Potter would benefit from a sexually ambiguous author, hence JK Rowling rather than Joanne. Don’t know if that still holds true 15 years or so later.