More Fool You

You should never cave into the demands of activists. Never.

British author Sebastian Faulks says he’ll no longer physically describe female characters in his novels – after he was criticised for doing so in a previous book.

Discussing writing female characters as a white male, the Birdsong writer, 68, says he’ll leave it to readers to decide what the women in his books look like, telling The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival he felt ‘liberated’ after the decision.

However, fellow authors Dawn French and 2019 Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo said the notion that writers can’t write about something they don’t know was ‘ridiculous’.

I’m with French and Evaristo here. Tell the activists to do one.

Here, then is an extract from a story…

I was loadin’ it up when she rode into town on that big bay of hers. I stopped my work briefly lifting my hat, wiping the sweat from my brow and shielding my eyes from the sun, watched her as she rode down the town’s dusty street. Lounging in the saddle after days on the trail, with dust spattered down her full length coat she was an image that burned into my eyeballs. Folk hereabouts said she was a half-breed Comanche and I reckoned they was right, too. Long dark hair flowed from under her wide brimmed hat with its eagle feather dangling from the brim, beads braided into the strands of hair that fell down each side of her face with its strong straight nose and dark eyes and knee-length black leather boots with silver spurs tucked into dark cotton pants.

I’ll never forget those eyes. Deep pools of nihilism that pierced you when they caught sight of you – freezin’ you to the spot. And I froze, despite the temperature. I ain’t never froze like that before nor since, I reckon.

One of mine. I also describe Pascale Hervé in Resolution. I am currently writing a pirate story and the female characters are described in that. Indeed, I describe all of my characters, male and female with enough detail for the reader to have a picture in their mind’s eye and I fully intend to continue doing so.

2019 Booker prize winner Bernardine Evaristo, 62, blasted the notion writers can’t invent characters beyond their own communities as ‘ridiculous’ saying there was ‘no logic’ to stopping people writing about different ethnicities.

Quite. The quartermaster on my pirate ship is an escaped slave. I have never been a pirate, I have never been a slave, I’m not black and I have never sailed a ship, but I’ll write about them anyway. Faulks is a moral coward.