If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, can we ever really understand each other? If it’s so hard for people to understand how the opposite gender thinks, how is it possible that some authors write so fabulously from the opposite gender’s view?

It’s really no different from a writer of a particular age, religion, race, nationality, ethnic group, or social standing creating believable characters who are at the other end of the spectrum. Crossing gender lines requires getting under the skin of the character, acknowledging universal human qualities, thoughts and feelings, then respecting that character’s otherness. In a word, it requires empathy. One must be able to feel what another experiences, then imagine how those feelings would make the other one respond. Even if the writer does not like what a character does, the writer must feel the reasoning behind the action. Because it is the character’s “truth”, even if it is not the author’s.

Armed with empathy, all good authors also have a keenly developed sense of observation. They break through clichés to notice the details that make us unique and alike, the exotic and the familiar. For a character to be interesting and memorable, readers have to recognize aspects of themselves while being amazed or amused by differences. That’s what great authors bring to their characters, even when the main character is of the opposite gender.

Authors who have been especially successful creating main characters of the opposite gender include Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland), Edith Wharton (Ethan Frome), Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina), George Eliot (Silas Marner and Middlemarch), Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie), J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter) and Steven King (Carrie and Dolores Claiborne). Of note is the very contemporary indie novel Transition to Murder (originally published as Coming Out Can Be Murder) by Renee James. This excellent crime thriller/psychosocial study is written by a transgender woman whose main character is a transgender woman going through the transition from living as a male to living as a female while seeking justice for a murdered transgender friend.

When an author successfully crosses the gender line and gets under the skin of a character, the journey is so smooth that we don’t realize the bend at the beginning of the path.