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 childrens lit authors. I dont remember his reasoning. It was included in a forward he wrote to “Roald Dahls Book of Ghost Storiesâ€. I have it somewhere but like the vast majority of my books, its 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 Compasss heroine Lyra who was conceived by a man, or John Greens character Alaska,
and how about Libba Brays tortured Cameron in her current novelGoing 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 boys POV. Always believed that I would write adventure stories for girls, but thats not what came out of me. It was Feltus and he demanded to have his story told.
So I dont know. One could say that fantasy has always been a mans game (Tolkien, etc….) but that would be forgetting Ursula K. LeGuin, and Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Anne MCCaffrey and Madeleine LEngle, and thats just stupid.
Any thoughts? Id 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.