Picture this: I’m 23. I’ve just recently completed the Master’s in Professional Writing program at USC. Another graduate is working as an editor for a reputable New York agent. She takes a liking to me and my writing. She invites me to a party at her house in the Hollywood Hills to meet this agent. At the party, the agent says she wants to sign me, based on just the IDEA of my book (I think she was slightly intoxicated). As this is happening, I lock eyes with a guy — also a writer, the hostess tells me — across the room and have this sudden, weird sensation that I could love him. He invites me out afterward, to a bar where we share french fries and wine and talk until 2am. When I go home, I tell my mom (I was living with my parents at the time, to save money and focus on making my publishing dreams a reality — a phase I can only describe as totally naive now), “I got an agent! And I think I met the guy I’m going to marry!”
Within a year, everything fell apart. The agent said she didn’t think my book was marketable, after all — something about it being very adult content from the point of view of a 17-year-old (apparently, she has not read Catcher in the Rye). She couldn’t decide if it was Young Adult or not so we parted ways.
Same with the guy.
I found myself fixated on the disillusionment of the failed relationship — with the guy, not the agent. I didn’t understand why it went so wrong. I wanted to understand. Desperately. And that’s when I started writing from a male perspective. Maybe it was some attempt to access the guy’s mind, to hypothesize his feelings, to create closure for myself.
Then I realized that I like writing like a man. It’s liberating. It takes me out of myself. Of course, I have slip-ups. For example, I wrote a scene with a guy sitting in an empty bath tub, thinking, and a guy friend read it and said, “Kim, a guy would never just sit in an empty bath tub.” It’s like that episode of Sex and the City when Carrie is dating the writer, Berger, and has to break it to him that his scene with the woman wearing a scrunchie is totally unrealistic (unless the book is set in the 1980s).
As a contributor to DimeStories, I was interviewed by the OC Register a couple years ago and I made the mistake of mentioning that I like to write from a male perspective and this is how it turned out in the paper:
Um, how creepy does that sound?
Oh well. I continue to write like a man. The novel I’m working on now, Cherry Blossoms, is from male perspective. I’m convinced my next one will be female though.
Do you ever play around with point of view? Have you switched genders?