SWITCHING GENDER

Male? Female? Or Even, One Day, Transgender?

I hadn't really thought about it before, but recently I realised that coming up to half my stories and novels  have been written from the viewpoint of the opposite sex, that is, from the viewpoint of a man or boy.

I can't give a reason, except that for certain themes and situations it seems to fit. For instance, in my short story THE FLOATER, an elderly man is on honeymoon with his very young second bride. In THE SMILE, an English couple are stranded in a remote Spanish village still adhering to the decrees of the Spanish Inquisition. The husband is the narrator.

In THE MYSTERY OF CRAVEN MANOR and THERE'S A LION IN MY BED!, both for Middle Grade readers, the main characters are boys of 11 or 12.

And in CABBAGE BOY, the novel I'm writing now,

the viewpoint character is a boy coming up to 16 years old.

So, a note to all writers: don't just accept that you have to write from the viewpoint of your own sex. If  your story needs it, try changing gender. It's easier than you think!

OFFENSIVE WORDS AND PHRASES

HOW WORRIED SHOULD A FICTION WRITER BE?

Yes, we're living in a PC world and none of us fiction writers wants to give offence but sometimes, unwittingly, we can use a word or phrase that upsets someone somewhere.

So far I'm only aware of one instance. In one of my books I sent two of my characters to a restaurant where they were served with a dish composed of the parts of an animal most people don't bother to eat, mixed with breadcrumbs, herbs and spices. It's a dish that goes back several hundred years - not to everyone's taste and more men than women enjoy it, but all that's irrelevant. The thing is, it has a name which is unobjectionable in England but not so in the United States. I won't mention it here.

And that started me worrying. As an English writer, how many other words might I choose which could cause offence across the Atlantic? And what about Europe? Japan? India? There could be long lists worldwide which I'm not aware of !

So, as well as the differences in spelling between the United States and us on our island, I'll be searching Google and Bing to see if I can find those lists.

GENRES, CLASSIFICATIONS AND CATEGORIES - THE WRITER'S MINEFIELD

It's easy to classify your books if you write a police procedural novel or a time travel fantasy or a conventional romance where two young people meet, hate and misunderstand each other but fall into each other's arms in the last chapter.

But how do you classify a book which crosses over from one genre to another, or even a third - and (in the case of my latest, The Family on Pineapple Island) can be read by parents to their youngest children or can be read by parents and grandparents for their own enjoyment?

Most of my novels are difficult to restrict to one genre. Take 'Affair With An Angel' for example. The heroine, a feisty young journalist, finds herself in a strange place that bears a slight resemblance to the Costa Brava. Or it could be Disneyland. Or the delirious fantasy of someone who loves pink.

How did she get there? Is she dreaming - or has she died? She's surrounded by others equally bewildered, some who've arrived by cruise boat, others by train from Mumbai, some even on a magic carpet. And who's this angel who's been appointed her personal guardian? Golden haired, dressed in white jeans and sporting a medallion, his name he tells her is Trevor. Whoever heard of an angel called Trevor?

It's a romance of sorts. A mystery. Science fiction? Whichever, it caused me quite a headache when I tried to choose the right genre.

But stories that wander from classification to classification are the ones I enjoy writing. Even if they leave me with yet more puzzles when I've completed the last page.