Writing Exercise: Literary Cross-Dressing

This Week’s Writing Exercise (Recommended for High School and Adult) Gender Bending Try rewriting one paragraph, or several stanzas of a poem, from an opposite sex point of view. What words and phrases change? Is the cadence of the voice different? Does your new narrator/speaker see or hear things that she missed before? It might lead you to some interesting discoveries. Here is a fun tool to help with your literary cross-dressing adventures. Try “Gender Genie” online. (This site came to me via a friend from children’s author Lisa Yee.) Submit a chunk of your short story, novel, or poem. The website will predict if the author is male or female. So…are you fooling anyone? Let me know. http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.html Next Week: Amok in the Catskills, The Mansion of the Soul