Writing Women: Tips for Crafting Authentic Female Perspectives

Women writing, and writing women: the last ten years have seen a veritable explosion in publication of writing by women, and about women – in fiction, non-fiction, autofiction, and hybrid genres. But what do writers need to think about when writing from and into these perspectives?

Good writing lives in specificity.

It must convey something singular, rather than generic, in order to come alive on the page. Beware of harnessing your story to op-ed generalities! Be granular, and chances are that granularity will speak to others.

Show us what it’s like to be the character, or persona, you’re writing from or through.

Zip us into that person’s skin (to paraphrase Mary Karr). Readers need to inhabit a character or a narrator’s experience, in order to feel invested in reading.

What is at stake?

For you, your characters, or your non-fictional persona? What is the struggle, the question, animating you or the voices in your writing? The reader needs to sense this – it doesn’t need to be explicit, but it needs to be there. Without it, writing tends to slacken.

‘Never humiliate or sensationalise yourself or others known to you.’

Juliet Jacques writes the above in Trans: A Memoir. She’s speaking about writing from life, in the first-person, but the advice applies more widely. A good writer can do anything with the fictional characters they write, or with themselves and others they examine in memoir, but humiliation and sensationalisation rarely make for good writing. Idealisation and what it inevitably leads to – the casting off from the pedestal – are not multi-dimensional enough to sustain satisfying reading. Curiosity makes for the best writing.

Good writing requires hard thought!

Read widely, read with curiosity, read what you don’t understand. And then set it aside and see what happens.