Two Female Coming-of-Agers

If you've ever so much as glanced over my writing on Vocal, you'll agree there's quite a good deal of coming-of-age in there. However, you'll probably also agree it seems to be written exclusively from a male perspective. The following plea for feedback was prompted by my friend Staringale, who read and gave me some very kind comments on one of the few exceptions to the above rule. This in turn started me thinking about the general absence of female coming-of-age tales within my body of work.

I completely appreciate that girls come of age too, and although you're a very decent lot and you've never levied accusations of self-absorption at me in the comments, there is as I say a real imbalance. My stories of male adolescence are semi-autobiographical, and although artistic license is usually taken, they remain close enough to lived experience to necessitate an anonymous first-person narrator. Again, if you've read any of these, I'm sure you'll agree we're always deep within this protagonist's point of view, and the fairer sex remains as remote and detached from the reader as it does from our hero himself.

In other words, after reading and replying to Staringale's excellent feedback, I found myself more and more concerned that readers of just her age and gender would not find much in the way of representation, even among the four-hundred-and-fifty plus stories on my profile.

So, the present plea for your thoughts is no more than as follows. In the two stories where I tried to do it, how do you think I did?

1) Sports Day, Chapter Two

This is the one Staringale very kindly read. Now, I do see there's nothing unique about boy-girl sports competition in my coming-of-agers, but please stick around for the very end if you can, because it's the thoughts from Neetra on which we close that are most on my mind here.

2) 4-H-N's Secret

A glossary note for all you non-Brits out there: the Duke of Edinburgh Awards Scheme consists of a series of practical activities in the general line of "training for life," and is undertaken by young people towards the end of secondary school. One of the tasks is orienteering, hence 4-H-N's ponderings on that theme as she and her friends trek back to civilization at the start of the story.

The latter in particular may be overburdened by my attempts to capture some kind of genuine female coming-of-age experience. I've spent most of my life in universities, so it perhaps follows that our three girls in the said story are at their galaxy's equivalent of that summer when you've just finished school and are about to leave home. That, to me, seemed one of the prime instances where coming-of-age comes about, if you will.

However, the operative word there is "seemed." I'm not from the kind of family background which I've striven to represent in 4-H-N's - which is to say, that of a more or less typical university student, whatever that means. As a matter of fact, I didn't even do the Duke of Edinburgh Awards Scheme when I was at school!

You might agree that striving after experiences and perspectives that were never your own, or even those which merely stand at one remove, tends to produce a "baroque" effect in writing. That is, just as baroque architecture not only replicates but also playfully exaggerates the styles of previous eras, so (in this case) my attempts at narrating female coming-of-age may feel to you all too similar - everything recognizable, perhaps, but not in any way to be confused with the real thing.

I mean, seriously, take 4-H-N's Secret. The summer before graduation and a day out with old schoolfriends before you part company and drinking in a bar because you're old enough to do so and driving in a car because you're old enough to do so and a big sister who's getting married soon and you realise you yourself have moved on from your childhood crushes because you're older now and you want different things from a relationship and PHEW! A ten-minute read perhaps, but even so, sounds like I managed to fill the ten minutes!

And that's my point. Overloaded? Artificial? A fine example of Doc Sherwood's girl-baroque?

If you ever have a minute, I'd so appreciate your letting me know a word or two on how you feel I did with these two out-of-my-comfort-zone tales. But above all else, if you do take a look, then first and foremost I hope you enjoy them!