Women in Writing

Here are some fun facts:

• The first autobiography written in English is credited to Margery Kempe, sometime in the 15th century.

• The first science fiction novel was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, 1818.

• The first fiction novel is considered to be The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, a Japanese woman in the 11th century.

• The first World Fantasy Award was awarded to Patricia McKillip in 1975 for her novel The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.

• The first novel categorized as "young adult" was published in 1942 by Maureen Daly, Seventeenth Summer.

Here's a fun experiment. Go to your home library (or your virtual one, if you're an e-book reader!) and look through how many of your books are written by women. The odds are, if you are a woman, it will be full of female writers. If you are a man, there are likely to be a majority of male writers.

A long time ago, I read a seething article about the prejudices against women in publishing. I read the article, brow creased. I stood up and looked through my own book collection, which at the time was conveniently displayed in several large bookcases, and started looking. About half of our books were written by women. So where was the prejudice?

I was married by then, and I looked again. My books were almost all written by women, and my husband's books were almost all written by men! Ha!

Does this represent some kind of prejudice in publishing? I would say it's something simpler. Women write books that other women are naturally more interested in. We include personal character arcs and obstacles that would be problematic to a woman. And men tend to naturally write about things that men care about. As much as my husband loves his books, and tried gamely to convince me to read them, I just can't get interested in most of them. I don't care about lich kings or soldiers in space or zombie apocalypses.

However, when I recommend a book to him, I usually preface heavily with, "Well, there is a lot of romance between some of these characters. But if you ignore that, I think you'll like the rest!"

Are there women who like to read (and write!) about lich kings and soldiers in space and zombie apocalypses? Absolutely! Are there men who read (and write!) romance novels? Absolutely! I'm just talking about generalities.

Personally, I'm in love with everything I've read so far by Brandon Sanderson. I read Frank Herbert's Dune and was enthralled. As a teen, I read The Redemption of Althalus over and over, which was written by a husband and wife David and Leigh Eddings. I could name a hundred more male writers that I've read and whose books I've loved.

At the same time, I can remember being a young teenager, sitting in the basement floor of a used bookstore, digging through books and finding wonderful gems written by women. I had a library of ladies smiling encouragingly back at me from the shelves in my room while I wrote little stories to share with my friends.

I don't know what it's like to be a little black girl, looking at a wall of white Barbies. I have no idea what it's like to be the first female police officer in a precinct, or a female soldier with all male superiors. I can't speak to those experiences. However, I sometimes wonder, if I'd had a bookshelf full of male-only authors, would I have still written my stories?

I suspect the answer is yes. I would have. It didn't occur to me to do anything different than what I was doing.

But later? When I was a thirty-something mom? I think it made a difference then. I don't know if I would have pushed my books forward to publishing if I didn't know that there were countless other women doing the same thing around the world.

As I geared up to publish Rabbit-Trapped, I was met with a community of local writers, most of whom were women. The support I received there made a huge difference.

So maybe the story isn't about prejudice in the world of publishing. Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with male vs. female at all. Instead, maybe the lesson learned here is that whatever you choose to do, do it with the support. And if you need encouragement, if you think you can't do it because of your gender or age or race, take a look around. Ask those people who support you. I bet they will tell you that none of that matters.

Here's another fun "fact" in the world of writing: of people polled in America, something like 81% of them wanted to write a book. Of those people, only about 3% went on to write a book. Of those who wrote the book, about 20% of them actually published it (the numbers vary a bit, depending on where you look).

The odds are stacked against you, no matter who you are or what you are trying to do. Unless your life goal is to sit on the couch and "doomscroll," there is probably a statistic somewhere saying you're unlikely to accomplish it.

I guess the real question is this: What are you going to get up and do?