The biological qualification game

Greg McGee has a fascinating article on Newsroom about writing a female character under a female pseudonym. He states:

I’m really not interested in whether the writer is a biological male writing characters who are biological females, or any non-binary variation of those, or biological Europeans writing biological Māori or biological old writing biological young, or tall writing short, or fat writing thin, nor any of the vice versas. It’s easy to reduce that old writing maxim – write what you know – to its logical absurdity: my writing world would be limited to tall, white, red-headed males with big noses, 70 or younger, who would only have lived and experienced exactly where and what I have.

Believe the words on the page or don’t. Find them authentic or not. We should trust that the author’s engagement with the world depicted and the characters who people it will determine its authenticity. Often one page is enough. We shouldn’t need an authorial biography or biology to authenticate them: the words work in their mystical way, or they don’t.

That should be the great ongoing strength of the novel. Television scripts and screenplays are necessarily bogged in bureaucracy. If you want funding from the NZ Film Commission or NZ On Air, you can’t help but play the biological qualification game, and prove that the fingers that hit the keyboard have some relationship to the gender and ethnicity of the principal characters on the page. 

Nice to see McGee defend writing and authencity as being more than biology. Sadly this is becoming a minority view.

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