You open The New Yorker (hypothetically, you understand), thumb to the fiction, and start to read…
“I like girls,” I told Uncle Jake.
We were fishing out in the lake, and the sun was going so fast you could almost see it sink.
“Women, I mean,” I said, filling the silence. He was giving me a long hard look. I knew how he felt about these things, but I had been planning all week to say what I said. So done. It was said. Now I just waited him out. “Well, then,” he kind of growled after a while, “If that’s how it is, I think I can introduce you to one.”
I felt my face go hot with shame and something else I couldn’t track. Wow, this would be something really new, I thought. This would be a milestone.
Question: what’s going on in this story? A boy’s initiation into sexuality? Are you sure? Note that the narrator could very well be female. What then? If you didn’t guess correctly, then everything, everything will have to be rethought. You’ll have to go back and reread to reexperience the story’s true opening. It’s a minor irritation, but it just might be enough to make you lay the story aside. Of course, you have every intention of coming back to it, but in truth…you never do. Multiply that experience by thousands of readers and you are witnessing the demise of a story.
Neglecting to identify gender is one of the classic errors in first person writing. What could have prevented this opening’s confusion? One hint. A single clear hint. Consider:
“Well, son,” he said after a moment….
Or:
“Well, honey…”
It’s so simple, and it’s all you need. And make no mistake, unless you have a conscious strategic plan that specifically requires keeping the reader in the dark, you do need it. If you don’t, readers will instinctively rush to fill the empty gender gap because that’s what readers do. Why? Why does oxygen fill a vacuum?
So, like it or not, by page 2 or 3, a reader will have already chosen “boy or girl”–and if the choice turns out to have been wrong, the result will be mild distraction, flat-out irritation, or worst-case, an unread story.
(Note: the passage I quoted didn’t really come from The New Yorker: I wrote it to illustrate my point.]
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Isn’t that the truth? The entire time I was reading it, I was wondering if it was a boy or girl, LOL! It could work either way.
I was pretty certain it was a woman speaking only because (1) the pink/blue illustration clued me in that gender was in question; and (2) a woman heightens the drama because she is saying something unexpected. But who’s to say? Certainly not the writer, in this case!
I agree that letting the reader know a narrator’s gender in first-person. This is true for nonfiction too, of course, and as you say, just one word can clue the reader in without distracting. ‘Course I suppose there are times when the writer might want the ambiguity, and then the question becomes how long can you tease out the reader before irritating him/her?
By the way, since you’ve already started the opening to this clearly New Yorker-worthy story, I hope you’ll finish it….whichever gender you choose for the narrator.
Actually, an extended tease, or any other unconventional strategy, can work as long as it’s meaningful and done with intent–and skill.
I kept myself clueless on purpose, but if I were writing a real story, that kind of not-knowing would be criminal–which of course is the point. As for taking it further, Lisa, I wrote it just for the post, without any larger designs. If anyone would like to grab it as a prompt and write forward, it’s all yours.