Now the title of this post is misleading but bear with me – will get there.

The lady in the photo here on the right is Anais Nin – and she wrote erotica.
Sorry… Erotica, capital E – she wrote Literature.
Now I do not know if this is true or if it is an urban legend, but I was told (or I read somewhere) that the first erotic novel of Anais Nin she wrote as a teenager, with a medical handbook close by for reference.

And I like that, because it confirms one of my ideas about writing:

write about what you know, no matter how you acquired that knowledge.

So, what has that to do with female characters?
Let me explain.

You see, the two stories I’m currently working on for my publisher* feature a strong female lead.
It’s not an accident – I pitched them like that, as stories with a strong central female character.
I like women, and I like writing about women.
And of course that’s like tap-dancing on a minefield, because I may be a fantasy writer, but I like my characters to be… real.
Or something – plausible? realistic? solid and three-dimensional? true?
And the risk of my old and dusty male brain pulling out some sort of ugly cliché, offensive stereotype or plain stupid prejudice, injecting it in the narrative, is always there.
But actually that’s part of the fun – the difficulty, the challenge, the keeping-an-eye-out makes it fun.

And here’s the reason why the title of this piece is wrong of course – the difficulty, the challenge, the fun, comes from writing any character that’s different, in some way, from us.
Male, female, foreign, young, old, Gill-Creature from the Black Lagoon…
Because we must respect the difference and convey it to the reader, while at the same time finding common ground, finding where that difference is just illusion – because without some common ground, we cannot communicate, we cannot empathize.

So what about Anais and her medical handbook?

Well, yesterday I spent a few hours of cheerful silliness commenting with some friends a recent book that’s doing pretty well in the Italian SF Top 100 in Amazon.
The book is amazingly bad.
And I won’t tell you the title or the author or the publisher – it’s in Italian anyway, so you do not run the risk of wasting your money on it.

Apart from the wooden prose, what makes the book in question bad – and what caused endless hilarity yesterday as we read it – is the central female character.
Cliched is not the right word.
The character is a bad version of every adolescent fantasy in the 1950s-1980s time-frame – the sort of thing a naughty choirboy might put together after spending an afternoon browsing his uncle’s collection of old Playboys or his cousin stack of racy manga.
It’s supposed to be sexy, but it’s only embarrassing.
It is painfully clear the author never met a woman, but spent his days at a distance, ogling the girls as they passed by and trading salacious comments with his friends**.

And as we commented the author’s bad prose and offensive cliches and laughed evilly, I thought of Anais Nin, and her medical reference book.
Because if you are going to write a story featuring something you don’t know – be it astrophysics, Mexican cooking or the female psyche – having some reference handy might spare you a pratfall.
Hint – a stack of girly magazines is not a good reference on female psychology.
Or anything else, really.

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* That does have a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? My publisher.
** … and if writing such a character was a conscious choice (I doubt it, but let’s be charitable), if that character is that bad by design, then I am aghast at the sort of target audience this author is catering for.