Today’s guest post is brought to you by Swati Avasthi, author of the Cybils-award winning SPLIT. I’m extremely excited to have her talk about writing a male voice as a female. We’ve all read books written by females that try to capture the guy voice; try as they might, they don’t always succeed. However, Jace — the main character in SPLIT — is an authentic and real guy. There is little doubt she got it right and there is little doubt the appeal to both guys and girls on this title. Without further ado, Swati shares her insights on the process.

Whenever I was asked how I – a thirty-something woman – captured the voice of a 16-year-old boy in my debut novel, Split, I would answer that Jace’s voice came to me fully formed. Which is code for “I don’t know.” Jace’s voice certainly came to me easier than either of the two protagonists’ voices in my second novel – both teenage girls. Which seems counter-intuitive, right?

After all, I have been a teenage girl; a teenage girl who really didn’t have any boys in her life until she started dating at 16. A teenage girl who grew up in a mother-centered family, with two older sisters, and went to a high school where two thirds of my graduating class were girls. My cousins (both of whom had older brothers) would rush over and sink into a “real girl’s house,” tentatively experimenting with make-up and indulging in the Charlie’s Angels paraphernalia.

So, why on earth was it easier for me to write from a boy’s POV than a girl’s?

It is because writing isn’t really about what we know. It’s about what we can discover. It’s about using the imagination to chart our course through the unknown.

The power of imagination has been losing value on the stock market of ideas in this post-modern, post James-Frey, reality TV, search-for-credible-information age, where we focus on the writer’s background. We ask, “What standing does the writer have to write their fiction?”

An actor once told me that when he used his imagination to get into his character, he would think of a piano: We all have the same 88 keys. The variations are infinite, but the notes are all the same. You just have to think about what notes this person plays loudest in their lives.

We use our imaginations, our ability to empathize, in order to bridge the gap between the known and the unknown. We find the notes in ourselves that we don’t use and explore them.

So what makes one voice sound authentic and another sound false? Why did I have to work harder at capturing a girl’s voice?

As it turns out, Jace’s voice didn’t come to me “fully formed”, it grew through daily character exercises that pushed my imagination, that forced me to think of Jace in new and different ways. Book no. 2 has TWO protagonists, two characters and their voices to develop. It turns out gender differences had nothing to do with it, it just took me longer to develop both voices, and the truth is – there are no short cuts.

The question isn’t whether I, as a writer, have experience in the area. It is not about whether I am a teenager, or a boy, or an anything else so simple and generic. It is not about the depth of research, although that certainly helps. The question is whether I captured the heart of my character on the page. Have I found the character’s voice and have I let them speak, without flinching, and without manipulating them? Can my readers listen to the notes he is playing? If you can you listen to the rhythm, the flow, and the cadence, if you can imagine his life off the page with ease, then you have an authentic voice — gender differences be damned.