Hi there

This may seem a daft question but I hope you can help.

I'm trying to write something from a male perspective. I have a clear idea of who my character is, but I don't know how "authentically male" he is (whatever that means). I could ask the men in my life to read bits but he's a very different kettle of fish from the blokes I know.

I'd like to read some contemporary male authors - not to create a composite picture from them, but just to get a sense of whether I'm heading in the right direction. The men I read tend to be super-refined - McEwan, Hollinghurst- and that's not exactly right. Can anyone recommend any?

Hope this makes some kind of sense, thanks for any help!

You could try Graham Swift's Last Orders, which is beautifully written from the PoV of a various, very ordinary, oldish Bermondsey blokes. I will get back into it, I hope, though it was so male that I found it quite alienating, and found I wasn't reading it. But the structure's fascinating too, and I do hope I'll get back to it some day.

Emma

How about Nick Hornby, although not 'How to be Good', which has a female protagonist. John O Farrell and David Nicholls have very funny takes on what it is to be a man. I would recommend 'The best a man can get' by O farrell, and whatever David Nicholl's latest one was (can't remember). It was about an actor and was very sweet and funny. Hope that helps.

Thanks guys. Emma, I've tried Last Orders too, it made me feel so stupid I couldn't get on with it- but maybe I should grit my teeth and have another go. The Hornby might be more my style.
The whole idea of one sex writing for another really interests me. I'm reading Updike's Villages at the moment and I think he's a brilliant stylist but dreadful at women.
Thanks for your help

Glad you couldn't get on with Last Orders either - I felt a bit of a failure, but Oh, Lord...

Half of TMOL has a male narrator. To be honest, I think we know more about men than we think we do (if you're really being feminist about it, the oppressed have to study their oppressors minutely, for their own safety), and that comes through quite naturally.

Having said that, it's worth running it by a reasonably literary bloke who is alert to subtleties of language. I remember a man commenting that a male narrator wouldn't say, 'There was mud on my thighs' but would just say 'legs'. 'Thighs' apparently a female word. I'd never have known that!

Emma

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Philip Roth, btw? And how about the detective in Ian Rankin's? Great character, and unarguably male.

The World According to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson. The most bloke-based book by the world's leading bloke. It's hilarious too, but on a more serious level, because it's written from an autobiographical perspective, it's a genuine and honest insight into the male mind, from confusion to fascination.

Colin

Thanks everyone. Wow, what an interesting range of suggestions. I love the Rankin and Clarkson combo- the tough guy posturing (no insult to men out there, us girls posture too, just in different ways).

Emma, I can relate to the thigh comment. My boyfriend read a sentence of mine that had the phrase "now he'd have to shampoo the carpet again." He said, men don't say "shampoo" (even tho' that's literally what he's doing)- they'd just say "clean".

pestcontrol, that's interesting. In fact, I can feel a thread coming on...

Emma

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Raymond Carver is also wonderfully male in that way.

I think you were on the right track to begin with. There is no more a composite 'male mind' than there is a woman's.

JB

There is no more a composite 'male mind' than there is a woman's.

Of course that's true. But to the extent that societies inculcate differences between the genders, those inculcated in the other gender take a bit more getting to know. There are differences in a society between the verbal habits, manners, expectations. Then there's peeing standing up, childbirth...

Having done a drama degree, I've watched many men putting on mascara for the first time. It was comical, not only in their fair-enough fear of poking themselves in the eye, but also the nervous jokes. It does make you realise how many small things are absorbed by one gender and not the other, and also just how many everyday things have a gender-aspect to them (okay, mascara's an extreme example. But what if the only oven gloves in the shop were pink? What would the man in my story do?). Of course that imaginative entering into other worlds is one of the things that writers do, so it's only really one version of our usual job. I'd probably write a man of my own age and background much more easily than I would a Brazilian lady trapeze artiste of the 1820s, after all.

pestcontrol, there's a truly fascinating book out which had an extract in the Observer recently, by an american woman journalist who dressed, and passed, as a man for a year. Can't remember the title,; I'll post it if I can.

Emma

I agree with that, but I also think you should be careful not to write a man-by-numbers (Nick Hornby is a terrible suggestion). If you write your character from the heart, and he really isn't your average male in the first place, I think you'll be able to convey that and make it believable anyway.

JB

Yes. I think looking for things in other writing often only works if you read it freely, as you would anything else to feed your imagination, rather than making notes and doing pastiche-male or pastiche-Austen, or whatever. And then whatever you write later is naturally yours, rather than borrowed from someone else.

Emma

Hey! Nick Hornby is not a terrible suggestion, thank you! I bet you haven't read About a Boy. I haven't read Hi Fidelity or Fever Pitch, but his books since then, to me, handle the insecurities of being a man very sensitively.
So there.

I have just got About A Boy from the library, so thank you, not a silly suggestion at all.

JB, completely agree about the dangers of creating an Identikit boy- but I do think there are some differences (maybe socially rather than genetically inculcated) that I need to think about. For instance, my natural writing style is very lyrical, and I've noticed that the men I know find that aspect of my work a bit tedious, whereas the women have more patience with it.

(That could be because my work IS a bit tedious, of course ;-))

Emma, is the book you mentioned Self Made Man? That's also on my bedside table. It's fascinating BUT she does seem to regard maleness as a sad pathological condition- "oh those poor boys, they can't express their emotions like we can"- which I didn't notice, but my chap found very patronising. Interesting.

If you wanted a thread about boys n girls, I'd be up for it.

Yes, I think that's the book I meant. It had a terrific review that I read. Of course, you could say the resistance to seeing their own predicament is very male...

Emma