Graham Storrs

Not much room inside

Sometimes, the characters I write are women. My readers never tell me I’ve got it wrong but maybe they’re just being nice. After all, how could I possibly understand what it feels like to be a woman? How could I know a female character’s mind well enough to know what she would do in any particular situation?

I suppose my answer has to be, the same way I know the minds of any of my characters. Effectively, a character is a simulation in my mind of the personality of an invented individual. This model of a character is built up by observing people in the world and trying to understand them. The mind of a character is actually a mind within the mind of the writer.

I’ve known many women, very intimately, for prolonged periods. In fact, I’ve been closer to the women in my life than to the men. Arguably, I should be able to create female characters more accurately than male ones.

Yet, being a man, I ought to have more insight into a male psyche than a female. After all, I have a unique access to the thoughts and feelings of at least one man: me. Which would be a compelling argument, if I thought I was a typical man. But, when I think about it, I find most of the men I’ve ever met are from Mars.

I was talking to a delivery truck driver the other day. I’ve met him a few times and we tend to stand around and chat after I’ve helped him unload. He talks almost entirely about hunting. He hunts for feral pig and kangaroos. He has dogs trained to root out pigs. He fishes a lot too. Killing animals is this man’s life. He enjoys nothing else quite so much and he does it at every opportunity. He might as well belong to another species for all that I can understand his motivations.

I used to have a colleague at work whose Idea of a great time was to go to strip clubs, get drunk and get laid – preferably for free but, if he had to pay, that was cool too. He was a salesman and was a member of several up-market strip clubs around town. He would regularly take his clients out to get them drunk and get them laid as part of his ‘networking’ activities. I talked to him quite often and it was clear that, to him, women really were ‘sex objects’. He regarded them only in terms of how attractive they were and how easy it would be to have sex with them. Their emotional or intellectual life was not something that ever crossed his mind. He saw women the way my hunter friend sees animals: as animated objects to be used for fun.

As a writer, I need to include men like this – and all kinds of other incomprehensible people – in my stories. They are commonplace – yes, they are – and to exclude them would be seriously to distort any ‘world’ I created. Yet how does one do it? How do I simulate in my mind, someone who I struggle to begin to understand?And I don’t just mean men, or women here. There is far more in common between men and woman than there is that is different. There is so much variation among people of both sexes that the intersex differences are almost lost in the noise.

The answer is this. I do what every other writer does. I do my best. I strive to make each character as complete and realistic and true as I can. I write as honestly as it is possible to, given the limits of my intelligence and my imagination.  What other answer could there be?