Dear Brian Keene (and everyone else)

So I saw a conversation you had with Cat Valente on Twitter about Big Fish and if/how women and men react to books/movies differently. I’m also very interested in this conversation and I want to ramble about it, so I’m putting it here rather than just Tweet-ranting.

Of course we all absolutely react to storytelling elements differently, built on a combination of our experiences in life and our gender. (Anyone who says your gender doesn’t affect you fails basic science because biology states we have different chemical/hormonal compositions and psychology states we are treated differently by society based on appropriateness in gender roles.) But what that means is different for different people. I can, though make some broad generalizations based on my own experiences.

Bouncing around between genres (eep, at first I typed genders. Fun!) as I do I see the gender divide in reading and writing. Let’s face it horror is generally male oriented, and romance is generally female oriented. Some say mystery is male dominated too, but I don’t think that’s true anymore seeing as there are more women writers in all spectrums of mystery writing from cozy (those baking and knitting mysteries) to SF (JD Robb, the queen of romance herself) and even gritty. And then Urban fantasy has to have a strong horror (the paranormal used to be completely the realm of horror) and mystery elements as well.

Anyway, I could make the large generalization and say women are more attracted stories with emotional conflict and men are more attracted to those with physical conflict, but that’s too general. We both know lots of great female horror writers and more female horror readers. The difference in is HOW the story is told. Much of horror focuses on a physical conflict. In 2008 at Context you said on a panel that writers should look for universal terrifying themes and you specifically mentioned finding a lump and losing a child. It’s telling that you immediately go for these things that cause emotional fear as unifying storytelling elements, but many many people immediately go to more direct physical conflict–you know a monster killing people in a small town. The sad fact is that a lot of horror isn’t layered and it doesn’t go outside of that external, physical conflict. Likewise a lot of romance doesn’t have much conflict outside of the relationship drama, which often feels forced (both because it’s a romance so you know there’ll be a happy ending, and because most of us are lucky enough to live a life where we can love who we want and not have to worry about drama from falling in love with someone.)

Is there necessarily something wrong with this? No, because not everyone reads to be challenged. Some people read to be taken away from the real conflict in their lives and they want something that isn’t too real. (Hell, who doesn’t do this sometimes?)

Keeping that in mind I think that men (again in general) are too challenged by emotional conflict which is why they feel “safer” with stories that focus on physicality. In stories like David Morrell’s Creepers you know that there is an emotional tension there, but Morrell’s style focuses far more on physicality in maintaining the tension. Morrell’s “hidden punch” is his use of PTSD, which of course is affecting the characters from the beginning but still the basic writing style doesn’t put you into that head space until late in the book when, combined with the external tension, it overwhelms the reader.

In contrast the more female oriented stories (again in general) tend to start with the emotional conflict, not the physical, which I think makes male-type readers more uncomfortable to begin with and less “into” the story. Most of a story’s success is in whether or not the reader can connect with it. This doesn’t just apply to the characters, but to the style of storytelling too.

Now of course we can connect with the “other” kind of conflict. I loved Big Fish as well. And two of my favorite “male” stories are Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series and your own Dark Hollow. I love these stories BECAUSE of their maleness. Dresden is a fairly traditional male character in a female dominated genre and he knows it. is awkwardness not just with romance, but in knowing how to be the white knight type in an era where women aren’t just empowered, but where all the women characters in the book are stronger, faster or more socially powerful than him.

Likewise Adam’s struggle with his wife’s miscarriage and pitting his “selfish” needs against hers (and his right to mourn the loss of a child versus her needs because she’s the one who experienced the physicality of it) made the book for me. It’s a terribly intimate story, made moreso by the fact that as a reader I was in the male head space. The monster story line was very secondary, but it tied in immediately with Adam’s fears that his wife didn’t want him anymore. But I can honestly say it’s a rare book that covers the emotional conflict and the physical, much less does it so well.

Many of the horror stories I read, even if well written still fall back on the same old tropes with a man having to save a woman (or a woman and child) while monsters pick off neighbors one by one. That can be fun, for sure. But it doesn’t hit the same nerves. Even some written by women follow the same pattern. Physical conflict with just enough emotional conflict to make you feel a bit sad when someone kicks it. And the fact is that there are a ton of those stories because that’s part of what readers want. (Getting back into people not always wanting to read to be made uncomfortable, not even horror readers.)

At the very least as a reader I have to demand a good story not treat people like me as cliched, flat characters that are more ideals/objects that vibrant parts of the plot. I just finished Michael West’s Cinema of Shadows and he does a great job of having two strong female characters without them being Daphnes or being super spechial and ultra powerful. His book was a totally fun read for me. However others that just make women in danger one more way to up the ante (because women are more vulnerable, you know) irritate me at best, and at worst outright tell me they have no intention of including women in their reader base. And there’s a lot of that in horror because, like every other genre, there’s a lot of decent, but ultimately lazy storytelling.

On the other hand I think there are a lot of female-oriented stories that confuse conflict for “a bunch of stuff going wrong that has no reason to”. Come to think of it the movie Armageddon was pretty much the exact same thing. OMG needless drama stories are as unappealing to me as Rambo-fantasies without the emotional bits.

There is cross over, but I think a lot of it is missed, mostly due to marketing slants and preconceived ideas about story types. Ann Aguirre’s Corine Solomon books are clearly written by an action and horror lover. In the first book the lead has to stage an invasion of a drug lord’s compound to save a woman being held captive by a kingpin and his wizard who are human trafficking and using people who die in the process as zombie enforcers. And Lucy Snyder’s Jessie Shimmer books pit a jaded woman against demons who prey, in many ways, more successfully on men because they manipulate those emotions which reap greater angst from males. Even the infamous Anita Blake books, especially in the early volumes, deal very heavily with really gory supernatural crimes. (In the second book a partially sentient zombie eats families to try to regain its memories. So we’re talking crime scenes with severed child hands left behind.)

But try to convince a die hard horror fan to pick one of these up. Or try to convince a romance fan that yes, they really will be able to connect with Dark Hollow if they just give it a chance. We both remember that years ago very few people, even horror fans, knew who Dexter was and Charlaine Harris wrote vampire porn which was destroying teh genre. And now what are two of the most talked about examples of horror in pop culture? People’s perceptions make them dismiss stories more often that picking them up.

When it comes to stories like Big Fish and The Road, yes there is a difference in the experience between men and women, in general. Both depend very heavily on the father-son relationship. My husband and I walked about it after we saw it. To me it was an amazingly fantastic story about a man who lived big. I thought it was a beautifully presented tale. But my husband connected with the son’s realization of who his father really was in a way that I didn’t. He also cries every time in Monsters Inc. when Boo has to go home.

Meanwhile I cry every time in Practical Magic when the towns people who hated the sister witches join hands to cast the abusive ghost out of Nicole Kidman. He likes the movie, but that is definitely has more of an impact to me. We both cried when Dumbledore died and let’s not even get into What Dreams May Come or A.I.

I think it takes a very careful hand to sculpt a tale that doesn’t get too beat ’em up nor too sappy. It’s easy for us as writers, because we’re readers too to tell the story to ourselves as much as our audience. When I wrote Rot it was partially a dare to myself to write a story with an actiony type typical male horror lead, but then to confront him with a massive amount of emotional horror to see if I could do it convincingly enough to pull along readers. As an opposite in Wolf Heart a theme I tried to write in was making a peaceful woman a werewolf (where many people use it as an excuse to be savage) and making her powerful enough that she has to struggle with whether she should use that to be a leader or not. I write these stories because it’s a way to explore gender roles, psychology, sexuality and yeah, a bit of geekiness and brutality.

But again, a lot of reading is done for escapism and relaxation not to be challenged, which is, in the end, why we see these gender lines being drawn based, not really on where on the shelves the story fits, but on the tools used to tell the story. So that’s my long winded rant on gender and storytelling. Thanks for playing.