Y.M. Nelson
asked
Jennifer Weiner:
"In shopping my debut novel, I've noticed that there are a LOT of female literary agents. The agent is like the gatekeeper to the traditional publishing industry for authors. Why then is there so much less recognition/reward/notoriety for female authors than male authors?"
Jennifer Weiner
That’s such an interesting question, and you’re absolutely right. From the top of the bottom, women have all kinds of roles in publishing – they’re the agents, the editors, the publishers, the publicists and marketing people and the assistants who are going to become the agents, editors and publishers of the future.
Why, then, are the ‘great American novelists’ still mostly men? Why does it still feel like such an uphill value for women to get review attention, or win prizes, or just even be thought of the same way that men are thought of?
I think the answer goes to deep-seated internal biases. Think about the writers you read in high school and in college, the ones who made up the canon. If your schools were like mine, maybe you read a handful of women – Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf or Charlotte Bronte or Louisa May Alcott – but my guess is that the vast, vast majority of the authors you encountered were men. We all learned, in terms of what we heard and saw and what we didn’t hear and didn’t see, that excellence wore pants. That men exploring families and emotions was important, and women writing about those same topics were sentimental or domestic. And familiarity breeds more of the same – if Philip Roth won all those prizes and still wrote paper-thin stereotypical female characters, why wouldn’t the next generation of prizewinning male writers do the same thing?
Those biases are very deep-seated, and they affect the ways that books get packaged and marketed, how they’re described and how they’re sold. And when you’re a woman who’s making noise about the problem, it’s easy for people to write you off as jealous or delusional, and say that books by men and books by women are treated the same way. I’m very glad that there are organizations like Vida that actually count, and can say, “Hey, guess what, there are still literary magazines publishing and reviewing two times as many men as women. The New York Times is still giving out two reviews and a profile to more men than women.” I think that pointing out the disparities are the first step to getting things to change.
Why, then, are the ‘great American novelists’ still mostly men? Why does it still feel like such an uphill value for women to get review attention, or win prizes, or just even be thought of the same way that men are thought of?
I think the answer goes to deep-seated internal biases. Think about the writers you read in high school and in college, the ones who made up the canon. If your schools were like mine, maybe you read a handful of women – Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf or Charlotte Bronte or Louisa May Alcott – but my guess is that the vast, vast majority of the authors you encountered were men. We all learned, in terms of what we heard and saw and what we didn’t hear and didn’t see, that excellence wore pants. That men exploring families and emotions was important, and women writing about those same topics were sentimental or domestic. And familiarity breeds more of the same – if Philip Roth won all those prizes and still wrote paper-thin stereotypical female characters, why wouldn’t the next generation of prizewinning male writers do the same thing?
Those biases are very deep-seated, and they affect the ways that books get packaged and marketed, how they’re described and how they’re sold. And when you’re a woman who’s making noise about the problem, it’s easy for people to write you off as jealous or delusional, and say that books by men and books by women are treated the same way. I’m very glad that there are organizations like Vida that actually count, and can say, “Hey, guess what, there are still literary magazines publishing and reviewing two times as many men as women. The New York Times is still giving out two reviews and a profile to more men than women.” I think that pointing out the disparities are the first step to getting things to change.
More Answered Questions
Jackie Matey
asked
Jennifer Weiner:
So I've been reading a lot about the planning, structuring, and outlining of novels lately, and, to be frank, I've been incredibly intimidated in my own writing since then. When it comes to your books, especially those with three or four main characters, what does your pre-writing process involve? Scrivener? Index cards? Outlines? Character bios? Ritual sacrifices to the writing gods?
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