Writing Male and Female Uber-Spies

People know I love the Braves so much they send me email of condolences EVERY year they get crushed at the playoffs. Some of these are more tongue in cheek than sorry, of course, but this year, I actually received several which sounded comforting. ;-) One of my male friends, who loves to goad me about the Braves, did exactly that, mainly because he was impressed by the sixteen or whatever innings of torture that went with it. To have him actually trying to make me feel better in an email is sort of like getting Archie Bunker to apologize to his wife. Heh.

And the female in me love that. LOL. Awww...isn't that sweet kind of reaction. I wonder whether we, as a gender, is so easily touched and distracted? The male is conditioned not to apologize without mumbling; the female is conditioned to savor every little bit of tenderness from the male. This is especially so after he'd done something stupid that had made the female mad as hell and she'd planned on ignoring him for a while.

Do you think it's intentional or accidental that through good luck, his forgiveness is suddenly guaranteed? LOL. I'm always wondering about these things because I write about relationships in my suspense books, and sometimes I need to show the differences between the sexes on how they handle a situation, emotional or not.

A male blow-up typically comes when he has to deal with what he deems as "little" things that should just magically happen--like packing some item together to be sent at the UPS, or getting a present wrapped, or finding a problem in a computer program--and it not happening within five minutes. Okay, ten for the more patient ones ;-).

A female blow-up typically comes when she's frustrated after A LONG DAY of the above things happening plus a few more. She's more overloaded with anxiety about several things than one problem.

So during a head-on collision, the man would vent colorful language at this rather small (compared to the whole day of shit) incident in his life and he might even direct it at the woman. Now, let's say she just had been having one of those days full of kaka, and now she blows up back at him. And she is spewing out EVERYTHING, from item one to item x (and I mean one-to-x, since she's too unhappy to care when he points out that that's not chronologically correct).

The man stands there, a little confused, since he knows what he's frustrated about, but he has no freaking idea why the woman is yelling back because she is veering from, yup, item 1 to item x, with no connection. It usually, he realizes, comes back to him not picking up his clothes around the room, so he shuts off his ability to listen and goes back to his current problem, which makes the woman that much more frustrated. She ends the whole thing by screaming, "You never listen to me!!!"

Heh. How many of you have gone through this scenario? And exactly what happens after that?

This is a generalization, of course, but it's always fun them in a story. That's why TV comedies strike a chord; they play on certain generalizations that tickle us--the family dynamics; the love between friends; the sexual innuendoes. In spying too, the uber-operative has to start with generalizations to reach a determined and specific conclusion. It's very rarely personal for the spy and that's why it's hard to understand him/her. In writing about spies and operatives falling in love, I have to work with things outside the readers' experience of mundane frustrations to show how love is universal, that these people could be arguing about computers and weaponry not working and still sound like a couple.

I mean, obviously the male spy isn't going to be too pissed off about a non-working computer. He would just get another. Or blow it up with a weapon. And the female spy isn't going to complain about the same things you and I find frustrating...like a nailgun that keeps jamming up (hahaha, you mean, you've never complained about that? What's wrong with you?!) but I can write the similarities in how different each of them absorbs their problem day and how they deal with it.

And of course, after years of mocking her about her poor choice of teams, I'll now make sure my hero comforts his woman when her Braves team loses yet again. After all, that's an awww, sweet moment that is irresistible ;-). And that's another layer of emotion that tells the reader something...right?

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