Yawn. Haven’t we had about enough of this Mars, Venus baloney? Straight out of the mouth of one of the Orange Prize judges comes this bit of high wisdom (emphasis mine):
Muriel Gray, novelist, television presenter and this year’s chair of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (for which male writers are not eligible), accompanied the announcement of the longlist with an accusation that, by and large, the writers this year’s panel assessed lacked imagination, and focused too narrowly on their own lives and personal issues.
Women writers don’t work hard enough to escape from their own gender and circumstances - in short, says Gray, they’re failing to make things up, surely a prerequisite for good, absorbing fiction. She’s coined a phrase, rural schoolteacher syndrome, to describe the phenomenon: “the delusory condition that fools the sufferer into believing that an experience, say as ordinary as being a rural school teacher, is so interesting and unique that it’s almost compulsory to chronicle it … thinly disguised as fiction”.
Since for every “domestic” woman author you can find a domestic male author, and for every broadminded, imaginative male author you can find his female counterpart, can we lay this non-debate to rest now? And any sentence that starts with “Women writers don’t work hard enough,” doesn’t even pass the laugh test.
I agree with your comments. So what’s wrong with writing about issues that are seen as stereotypically female?! It is no better or worse than writing about anything else.
What exactly constitutes “stereotypically female” issues/writing topics?
I don’t look at gender when I’m choosing what I want to read. E. Annie Proulx managed to write two novels and a collection of short stories that I thoroughly enjoyed. And there is a list of other writers who wrote material I enjoy, and who happen also to be female.
Although she shoots herself in the foot by making such broad generalizations. I think Gray’s comments were less about female writers than the genre referred to as “chick lit” which is really “genre” writing (like fantasy, Sci-Fi and Horror) and not lit. And which seems to be popular lately among aspiring female writers.
The problems with any “genre” is that the “set of conventions” that are generally must be adhered to, does not lend itself to a less experienced writer. Now imagine that you’re a judge in a writing contest and have to wade through tons of manuscripts a majority of which happen to be weak attempts at the same genre because it’s what’s popular at the moment. In a similar situation I might be inclined to share Gray’s assessments. It would be like judging a mainstream fiction contest and everyone submitted Tolkienesque Fantasy.
Of course I could be on the wrong track entirely.
As to the merits of “chick lit” that’s an entire different conversation which I won’t go into, except to say it is not a genre I would (for a variety of reasons) spend my time or money on.
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