Along the same lines as Adrian's question about writing for the opposite sex, I wondered how everyone felt about writing for the opposite sexuality. As a hetero, do you feel awkward about writing gay story lines? If you are gay do you struggle writing straight romance? I have straight, gay and bisexual characters in my book. I found the gay characters the most difficult to make believable as I kept wandering into stereotypes. In fact, with one very gregarious character I had to develop a whole back story unrelated to his sexuality before I could take him seriously. Anyone else had difficulties adding characters outside the experience of their own sexuality? What do we think are the main pitfalls of writing outside your own experience in any context?
Firstly what a fantastic question Victoria. You're right to say it does qualify roughly the same question as writing for the opposite sex. Fortunately I do play it safe when I write but if I'm to write about the opposite sex I tend to look back at my siblings as we were growing up.
I've never felt the urge to write about gay characters as it's not something I would tend to read myself. I believe the film broke back Mountain did the storyline of two men very well unfortunately I would have to go back to my childhood to think of how two lesbians would act lol. (Boys and dreams)
I would suggest the same question would apply on writing a sexual novel. I am assuming in all three areas we would sometimes have to use our imagination or maybe go across to Soho for some research.
I understand the market for gay and lesbians novel is on the up. Maybe if we all write a page on one of the three subjects and post it on the site it could be good reading.
Regards.
Lol, I wasn't actually talking about sex. I don't seem to have any difficulty writing sex scenes for any sexuality. Or, I only find it as difficult as writing a hetero scene, which admittedly isn't a breeze.
The scenes I find most challenging are the ones between a straight man and his bi best friend. The combination is an unusual one in the first place, but I'm not even sure how two straight men interact in private. Are there things straight men don't say to each other? What do men hide from each other in conversation and how would that be altered by one of them being bi? In the end I think it actually helped me that one was bi because that made the things they avoided more predictable to me. I just wondered how others had got on with these sorts of questions.
Kudos to Fox, though. That's the sort of bravery I was looking for. Just because something is unknown to you, doesn't mean you can't write it. Writing what you know is all very well, but in my case that would mean I was stuck with a lot of married, white, female characters. Yawn!
Bahahaha....
Sorry. Ahem. That last sentence...oh dear.