en and women writers have long experimented with narrators and characters of the opposite sex, but there’s still debate as to whether or not they can do justice. There are strong opinions on this matter. Bringing a complex female character to fictional life is a daunting feat in itself; inhabiting their actual voice is even more challenging.

To Saad Shafqat, author of Breath of Death and Rivals, the process of imagining and writing female characters is a challenge that must be met with accuracy, fidelity and style. “You have to get the balance right because there are many sensitivities and pitfalls. There’s not much room for error. I’ve had the good fortune of growing up with a number of admirable women in my family, being married to a remarkable woman, having a bright and interesting daughter, and having the privilege of being friends and colleagues with several accomplished and opinionated women. This is ample material to draw from when I write a female character.” Shafqat says that while sketching his female characters, he doesn’t model them on a single individual; instead, it’s a composite developed by describing the attributes of several women he has known and then embellishing the picture with some fictional elements.

“When men write women, there is a temptation to sexualise the character; this is something one must resist, but you can’t resist it too much. Otherwise, the readers fail to relate to the characters. I was especially concerned about avoiding this trap with the character of Tanya Shah, who is one of the two leading characters in my novel Rivals. I asked my daughter to read an advanced draft and she thankfully spotted a few red flags. I then rewrote the parts. My editor for this book was also a woman – the seasoned Faiza Sultan Khan, formerly with Bloomsbury. She pointed out some troublesome areas as well. The final product definitely has more finesse.” He says it is essential that one or more women preview your work, especially if there are significant female characters.

Awais Khan, the author of In the Company of Strangers and No Honour, says that the work he produces is largely based on social issues but is ultimately fiction. “Of course, the things happening around me inform my work, but most of what I write is completely fictional. Sometimes, the character comes to me fully formed. I then proceed to write, but often it’s just a gist of an idea and I let the story determine the character’s journey.” Khan says that there are plenty of women-centric books from female Pakistani authors out there that need to be read. “I think it is very important for a character to not just be realistic, but also believable. That is always my aim when writing my characters, both male and female. As a male author, I feel that I must use whatever influence I have to write about pertinent social issues without sensationalising them.”

Sabin Iqbal, author of The Cliffhangers says that as a writer he empathises with his female characters. “I believe fiction is the reflection of life and the lives around the writer. Yes, I observe people around me. I try to understand the predicaments in the lives of women in my own family or in the society I live in. Though mostly, I write them as realistically as I can, I often do exaggerate or place them in a magic-realism landscape. But then, it happens to all my characters – not just women.” He says that as he mostly writes about rural people, his women characters “smell of soil and sweat”. He explores their hidden pains, secret pleasures and fantasies in the middle of their scorching realities. “I love to explore the frustrations, disappointments and escapades of middle-class women, especially those who are ‘grass widows’. Though I don’t support gender-bending feminism, I do believe the world, in general, is unfair to women on many fronts. When men attempt to write women characters, they can or may slip into a stereotypical portrayal of women unless they are cautious.”

“I think our job as fiction writers is to ask ourselves: “Do I NEED to be the one saying this?” or “can most people tell this story better than me?”. A yes to the former and no to the latter is the only combination where the magic happens. That is, when you write something worthwhile, not just another story that anyone can tell.” – Zain Saeed

Taha Kehar, the author of Typically Tanya, believes that strong adherence to feminist values can help writers produce strong women characters since if feminism is kept out of the equation, women characters lose their credibility and become mere caricatures. “On a personal level, I tend to conceive any character by first uncovering his or her distinct voice. What he or she says and feels plays a critical role in defining his or her personality. Without observing the people around me, I can’t possibly write a dialogue that is authentic. For instance, Typically Tanya uses the first-person narrative perspective, as I realised quite early that my protagonist’s voice was the novel’s lifeblood. I wanted to find ways of circumventing the male gaze and presenting a glimpse of public life from a woman’s perspective. I briefly opted for a third-person narrative perspective while writing the novel and discovered that the narrator was far too detached and voyeuristic.” His next novel, which will be released next year, is centred on how the ethnic strife in Karachi in the 1980s and 1990s influenced the lives of women. “A few years ago, writer Whitney Reynolds challenged her female Twitter followers to describe themselves as male authors would,” continues Kehar. “The results of this experiment were a scathing indictment of how men fail to portray female characters in an authentic manner. If this social media exercise is anything to go by, male writers who crawl into a woman’s skin fail to capture the nuances of womanhood because they don’t look beyond superficial considerations. Many of them seem to forget the power of empathy and ultimately produce testosterone-fuelled narratives that do little more than ‘mansplain’.” He stresses that male writers need to realise the difference between writing from a woman’s perspective and writing about women. The former requires rare insight into a character’s motivations while the latter is a mechanical exercise that doesn’t always result in an authentic portrayal of women. “More often than not, men tend to write about women in a rather stereotypical sense and often struggle to capture their voice.”

According to Zain Saeed, author of Little America, trying to write about things – people, cities, food, anything – outside of our obsessively lived experiences, always runs the risk of doing oneself and potential readers a disservice. “Why must you, dear reader, sit and read my opinion on someone I am not? A place I don’t come from? An experience I have never inhabited?

“Babar Azam is not the person we turn to for perspectives on what it means to be Bilal Maqsood; I don’t care about his take on the music industry, just like I don’t care about Maqsood’s opinion on the effectiveness of the reverse sweep against leg-spin. Ergo, in fiction, I don’t very much care for a man’s take on what it means to inhabit the world as a woman.

“I think our job as fiction writers is to ask ourselves: “Do I NEED to be the one saying this?” or “can most people tell this story better than me?’. A ‘yes’ to the former and ‘no’ to the latter is the only combination where the magic happens, that is, when you write something worthwhile, not just another story that anyone can tell. The question for me, then, is not whether men can write women protagonists “well” – I’m sure there are men who have great success with using their imagination to write other genders, and vice versa – it’s whether men NEED to be telling women’s stories. I don’t think we do – women can tell stories about themselves. I’d rather read those, thank you very much.

“On the other hand, when it comes to minor, non-protagonist characters of other genders (or races, for that matter) in my stories – because, of course, they will be there, they need to be there, they must inhabit the world – I simply try to base them on people I know, safe in the thought that I’ve probably done a terrible job of it, but also that, perhaps, they’re not too far from a meaningful portrayal, that hopefully, it won’t make someone want to hurl my book across the room, at least. That’s all I’m after.”

The writer is the   publishing editor at  Liberty Books