Pulp paperbacks have always provided a training ground for men, Some of them went on to become respected authors - Dean Koontz, Nelson DeMille and Martin Cruz Smith, for example. Why couldn't a woman?
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It is difficult to get men to pick up a female author. Women will read men, but men won't read women.
I wonder if novels work for women because they give us a safe place to talk about our ish.
Women are far and away the bigger consumers of fiction than men, but men are still far and away the more reviewed, the more critically esteemed, the more respected. That can get frustrating.
I'm not an especially male novelist, but I think men are better at writing about men, and the same is true for women. Reading Saul Bellow is a revelation, but he can't write women. There are exceptions, like Marilynne Robinson's 'Gilead,' but generally, I think it's true.
Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.
The bottom line is that female writers aren't being given enough opportunities by male producers.
I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.
I find women as writers and as characters are operating within narrow confines. They inherit a kind of ghetto of the soul. I'm trying to enlarge the spectrum.
Thrillers have been traditionally very masculine books; the women characters often rather decorative.
Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts.