Boy or girl? Clue Your Readers In

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.]