The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [28]
I get to meet my own fan-base at conventions and book signings and on-line. They seem to be pretty evenly divided between men and women, and with ages ranging all over the map, from eleven to eighty and sometimes up, with a diverse array of views on practically everything. A lot of folks report reading my books in families, passing them between siblings and generations both. They're a flatteringly bright bunch, on the whole. This seems to suggest my books don't exclude readers by gender.
LSC: This same question crops up among mystery readers—can a woman write believably from a man's viewpoint? The reverse seems to be less of an issue.
LMB: Ditto for romance. The reverse is often an issue in SF, though. I think the real answer is, "Some writers can, some can't." Men and women aren't that different from each other, in most areas of life. I think the proper question is, how on earth do writers avoid insight into the opposite gender? Guys are all around us, all the time. We live with them—I had a father, grandfathers, brothers, a husband, a son, male colleagues, bosses, fellow students—we read books written by and about them . . . Nowadays, we read on-line posts by them, in perhaps more startling variety than one's immediate family might offer, or so I would hope. Swapped around, the same is true for male observers. I think some people must screen out this data, as if knowing, or at least, admitting to knowing, was somehow a violation of their own gender identity. I was on a convention panel once with a male writer who was complaining—actually, covertly bragging—that he couldn't write female characters very well, the not-so-hidden subtext being that he was so ineluctably masculine, the terrible effort at getting his mind around this alien female viewpoint was just beyond him. (As though it were a subject impossible to research!) I didn't think he was ineluctably masculine. I just thought he was a lazy writer.
LSC: And you're a good writer. At least you've won lots of awards—which doesn't, however, mean the same thing.
LMB: Reading is an active and elusive experience. Every reader, reading exactly the same text, will have a slightly different reading experience depending on what s/he projects into the words s/he sees, what strings of meaning and association those words call up in his/her (always) private mind. One can never, therefore, talk about the quality of a book separately from the quality of the mind that is creating it by reading it, in the only place books live, in the secret mind. The real reason discussions of the quality of literature get emotionally hot very rapidly is that they inescapably entail a covert judgment being passed on the private and invisible mind of another human being. You can get into trouble by mistaking your reading experience for the reading experience, as though anyone who ran their eyes over the same words brought the same mind to it.
I'm not one of those control-freak writers who feel that everybody has to read the book precisely as I intended. I know perfectly well they're going to take this text and turn it into something in their heads that is at most fifty percent my contribution. When I do get feedback, it's kind of interesting to see the different things they'll do with it. They startle me sometimes.
Broadly, there seem to be to be two kinds of great books, and a lot of linguistic confusion engendered because people keep trying to conflate the two categories: books which are great because they are greatly loved, by many readers over time or perhaps only by a few, but no less passionately for that; and books that are historically important because they change the way other books are written. Not infrequently, a book may be both (Don Quixote, anyone?), but students of literature tend to concentrate on the second sort, and I think they are right to do so.
In general, it takes a deal of time to see if a book or writer will have the latter sort of impact. And sometimes books that pass the test with flying colors, such as the works of Arthur Conan Doyle or Georgette Heyer, still