Having constructed a scene in a book where a man and a woman must have a physical fight and the woman win, rereading it three days later I notice that I have written the whole six pages without a single declarative sentence beginning with the pronoun She followed by an active predicate! (Needless to say, there are many such sentences that begin with He.) All through the scene, although he occasionally reels from her blow or the like, she never actually hits him.

Another scene, another story: a discussion between a man and a woman. I want the woman to make an epigrammatic point that happens to be one I particularly believe in. Reading my tale later, I notice that somehow my woman is completely unanchored to the world of my story. No profession is mentioned for her, or any other source of income. How does she live? Where does she come from? Where will she go when the story is over? She is there only to make the point, and because she is, as a result of my failure, an insubstantial character, the point, as made in the discussion—in fact the whole discussion—is fairly insubstantial too. Yet I know that had I given the point to an equally minor male character, without even a second thought I would have constructed a whole series of past experiences, as well as a present situation, for him that would define a personality from which such a point might naturally flow. I know that ideas must be connected to character in fiction; it is one of the major aesthetic canons of my personal approach to writing. Yet time and again these methods of character construction, inchoate to the way in which I write male characters, have simply blanked out while I tried to create a female character in first draft after first draft. When I have been lucky, in second, third, or fourth, I have been able to correct some of this by conscientious contrivance.

Ten years ago, the result of this was that a number of readers (women) took it upon themselves to let me know they understood and appreciated what I was doing, and, in various letters, praised me for it—well before the phrase Women’s Liberation had received any of its much-needed currency. But language is a delicate medium; often it reflects the thought of the practitioner despite what he thinks he is thinking. A more recent and more informed reaction has been to note that, while there is the (rare enough) attempt to fill out my women characters, the attempts are contrived. I cannot argue; I know my method.

If it is annoying to watch methods creak, clank, and falter, it is shattering to watch intentions carom off the track to smithereen against the grandstand of cultural determinism:

I conceive a story around a form: “A set of couples, each member a distinct personality type, undergoes a series of situations in which, alternately singly and in pairs, each person must have an encounter with every other.”