THE GENDER DIVIDE, PART II: Tinkerers vs. Probers

Lots of good responses in yesterday’s post, and a lot of the ideas bleed into what I want to get into today. It’s hardly a new topic, granted. Just a few days ago, Karin Slaughter wrote in the Financial Times about how female writers tackle violence in ways that may be unique, or certainly different enough from male writers. When I linked to it, I noted that what I often found to be the case with certain writers, at least early in their careers, is that they almost overcompensated for this so-called gender effect—that women writing violence sometimes went over the top to prove they could be just as unflinching as a man—but in a different way. And that the net result wasn’t always positive, because no one denigrates women like other women.

Many fans lament when they read books by the opposite gender, their own gender gets shortchanged. I’ve heard complaints like, “So-and-so who’s male tried writing from a female point of view and it just didn’t sound like a woman at all,” or “why do female writers always create idealized portrait of men? They just don’t exist.” I’m exaggerating, but the overall sentiments are apparent and cause considerable hand-wringing. So why is this so? The best writing, as I and others pointed out in the first part, should be able to appeal to a wide variety of people, and so the best writers should be able to capture the emotions, tics and quirks of both men and women, ideally in an equal fashion.

Of course, that isn’t the case, and there are lots of examples, both in mainstream and crime writing, where certain books would not be what they are if they were written by the opposite gender.

Slaughter herself explains this fairly succinctly in the aforementioned FT article:

This focus on recovery – wanting to understand the “why” – is something that defines women’s crime fiction. While men are certainly capable of writing about women’s issues in sensitive ways, there is something about a woman’s perspective on violence against women that cuts closer to the core. If anything, I think male writers as well as readers benefit from this perspective. Family, friends, fathers, brothers – all the people in a victim’s life are touched. Violent crimes rarely leave just one victim.

I want to focus a little but more on the question of “why” because it’s something that’s a fundamental aspect not only of my own writing, but of everything I do. I was born curious, but there are different levels of curiosity. One is espoused by the question “how does it work” and such people become tinkerers—obsessed with detail, often falling in love with toys (especially of the electronic kind.) Others—I’ll call them “probers”—want to know “why does it work” or even more importantly, “why doesn’t it work”, which can then be extrapolated to deeper questions like “why does something happen/not happen” or “why does someone do something/not do something”.

There are, of course, exceptions to every generalization, and the same certainly applies here, but if I take a sampling of the crime and thriller writers I read, and try to put them in either category, the “tinkerers” will be made up primarily of men, while the “probers” are more likely to be women. “Tinkerers”, I would say, write big standalone thrillers, military novels, espionage, techno-thrillers, gangster-themed books, and so on and so forth. These books are heavy on action, very plot-driven, and laden with details—the more arcane, the better. They aren’t likely to be terribly introspective either, because they are too busy trying to advance the plot, even if they are character-driven. The best examples I can come up with this are some of my favorite male writers, like Ross Thomas, Donald Westlake, Thomas Perry, and Lee Child (never mind a lot of the bestselling male writers of the Grisham/Patterson/Clancy ilk, but as I generally don’t read them, I won’t talk about them here.) All wrote—or still write—great characters that grab the reader from the first, but they never sacrifice the advancement of plot and don’t have too many resting points for introspection. Thomas’s books are the archetype because the plots are so damned twisty and the characters so distinctive, but the blend is almost perfectly balanced.

“Probers” write the kind of books you might expect them to write—character-driven, psychologically inclined, strong sense of place and atmosphere, and while there can be a very strong plot, it’s not imperative for the story to work. People that immediately come to mind are the Psychological thriller queens like Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, Minette Walters, PD James, and Laura Wilson, more hardboiled-esque types like Denise Mina, Louise Welsh, and Val McDermid, and in the US, Laura Lippman and S.J. Rozan. The men that come to mind that could be included in this category—people like Peter Robinson, T. Jefferson Parker, and Stephen Booth—are those that at least to my knowledge, are read far more and appeal more to women and men. They have all the requisite plot-driven devices and their stories move, but perhaps at a more leisurely pace than would authors who could be more tinkerer-esque.

So, assuming these generalizations are valid (which is, of course, up for debate in the backblogs) can they truly be broken across gender lines? Or is it really a question of what an individual chooses to do, how he or she finds his voice and finds out what it naturally gravitates towards—action and detail, or psychological underpinnings and character development? And what of those writers who attempt, or are successful at, a combination of both? Or what of writers who don’t fit either mold but create new ones?

Maybe it is, as Robert Ferrigno said in the backblogs yesterday, a dangerous exercise to try to pigeonhole writers by gender. But I still have a feeling there’s something to it, even if it’s only a very tiny something. And so, once again, I’m curious for further thoughts on all this.