First person POV; genderless narrator.

[Britva415]

How would you write a first person story in which the narrator, who is also the protagonist, has no defined gender throughout the story, and is never revealed who they are?

I'd start by knowing what the goal is, what the point of such a story is.

for all I care gender is pointless to the story, at least for me as the author.

I don't feel like "For all I care" is a good reason to do this. Not if you want readers to buy it. I believe that you have to care, somehow. That there has to be a point to telling the story this way.

Possibilities include:

• The deliberate concealment (or non-assignation) of a specific gender accomplishes something which couldn't be accomplished with a revealed gender.
• A literally genderless identity is a plot point or somehow else a raison-d'être for the story and the storytelling.
• A specific feeling is to be invoked in the reader as the result of not knowing any gender for the narrator, and evoking that feeling is a necessary part of the storytelling.

 

[PrimalDual]

I'm more or less synthesizing what others have said* (arguably better) already: first figure out why you are even doing this? What important outcome this technique will bring? Answer that and the (lack of) gender POV of the story will probably write itself. If you are doing it just to mystify the reader, to impress the reader with your style, then the reader will likely instead resent it by story's end unless there is a perceived payoff.

A few of the examples given seem to skew toward sci-fi or horror or other genres that encourage points of view outside of the ordinary. To make it the crux of, say, a "summer romance at the beach" or something in Loving Wives would be a far taller order, IMO. Wife-swapping where the narrator neglects to mention their own gender and have it turn out to be same-sex couples - Expert Level craftspersonship!

For what little it's worth, in the most recent little story I published here, I decided at the last moment that the gender of "The Client" (a secondary character given nothing to do but be a foil to the protagonist's machinations anyway) wasn't important, so I went back and removed all gender references. This protagonist was established in a prior installment to be bisexual, so it truly didn't matter to the story at hand. I'm not super-experienced, so that was by far enough of a challenge for me. It was just for fun, on a whim, and presumably the majority of readers won't even notice. But to do it as the linchpin of the story would be beyond me, I expect.

* edit - Indeed Britva415 posted almost exactly my questions about 3 minutes before I hit Post, LOL.

 

[Britva415]

In mine above, it just isn't mentioned. It's never an issue.

One of the comments:

"What's interesting is that there's nothing specifically sibling based (I almost wrote brother/sister, but realized you never said the narrator was male: nice touch there)"

Another:

" We don't know what they looked like, what sex the sibling is, what they did for a living... anything."


The funny thing about it is that I didn't intend it that way. I just started typing and just never put that detail in. I was almost surprised at the comments, because I had basically forgotten it.

Yours is exactly the kind of thing I've been talking about.

That story actually has a "brother" tag on it. Beyond that, it was totally accidental - unplanned, unconscious - that you stripped the narration of any gender-identifying clues. I'm pleased for you that you got complimented on it, but I'd be even more impressed if it had not been a mere oversight and it were a story which something about it necessarily compelled this way of storytelling intentionally from the conception.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

I wouldn't do this at all unless the narrator's genderlessness was their gender identity (agender or nullgender or genderfree or others) and the narration reveals that early on.

Or at the very, very least, it would be really hard to succeed with a story like this without hanging a lampshade upon the genderlessness. Again - at an early point in the narration.

There are too many stories where, because of the first-person point of view, the reader doesn't know and can't tell the narrator's gender identity until the author just happens to "leak" it in a totally unintentional way.

Like, it doesn't even occur to the author that what they're writing doesn't let the reader perceive the narrator's gender the way the author does because the author already knows it.

These stories are infuriating. Half the time, I find out twelve paragraphs in that the narrator isn't the gender I imagined. The other half of the time, I just nope out before even finding out what's in their pants or under their shirt or on their credit card or their birthday card.

That's how to not succeed. To succeed, the writing would have to make clear that either there literally isn't a gender as a factual matter, or, that the mystery of the unknown gender is deliberate for some good reason.

Either that, or, the writing would have to be so good and the story would have to be so compelling that not knowing and not being able to tell the narrator's gender identity doesn't impede the reader's progress AND becomes a satisfying element to the complete story. As in, like, it's a story which couldn't be told any other way and probably still depends on genderlessness being the actual identity of the narrator.

You know what I'm saying? I'm trying to say something like "if this is only done as an experiment, as a cool writing exercise," and, without a real plan for why this specific plot of this specific story actually depends on being told in a way which either doesn't ever reveal the gender or does eventually reveal that the narrator is literally genderless, then it won't succeed.

Whether it goes viral or it flops I don't care. If I was looking for a guaranteed success (whatever the definition of success here is because all I'm seeing is a huge worry about views, and ratings, and all those things that, for this particular project, I don't care) I would be doing something different. I am completely aware that this is avant-garde territory, and I'm fine with it because that's not my ultimate goal. What I want to know if this is possible, how would I make it possible, and what do I get from doing this. The real goal to this thread was to see if someone has done it, and what advice could I get of those who did it. I dabbled with this in the recent past, but I want to take the idea seriously just as a one off, and then discard it and move on.

The only success I'll have is the learning experience I'll get from this. As I said to Plath, whether I publish it or not is my business. I am not obliged in any way to publish everything that I do, and I am most certainly entitled to destroy my own work if I choose to do so. Destruction, as I've learned, can also be a huge part of the process as it is publishing.

Your concerns feels more like this isn't the type of story for you, which is fine. I can't please everyone. Not even as a cam girl I did.

I'd start by knowing what the goal is, what the point of such a story is.

I don't feel like "For all I care" is a good reason to do this. Not if you want readers to buy it. I believe that you have to care, somehow. That there has to be a point to telling the story this way.

Possibilities include:

• The deliberate concealment (or non-assignation) of a specific gender accomplishes something which couldn't be accomplished with a revealed gender.
• A literally genderless identity is a plot point or somehow else a raison-d'être for the story and the storytelling.
• A specific feeling is to be invoked in the reader as the result of not knowing any gender for the narrator, and evoking that feeling is a necessary part of the storytelling.

The better point is the third possibility on the list you wrote, which is what I've seen from the examples that I've read and glanced upon.

As for the goal, there isn't any... yet. See, this is a feature and not a bug from my process: I never know what the goal is until I sit down and start writing. More often than not the goal shows up in the middle of writing, and some times it even shows up while editing. The problem is that the goal is never clear, so it is constantly shifting, or should I say, gets clearer the more I spend working on it. I can't plot obsessively, else I'd be planning more and executing less, thus works gets abandoned. I can't sit on my pants, else I'd be distracted by everything and the perfectionist takes over, and work also gets abandoned. Perfectionism is the bane of my life.

I'm more or less synthesizing what others have said* (arguably better) already: first figure out why you are even doing this? What important outcome this technique will bring? Answer that and the (lack of) gender POV of the story will probably write itself. If you are doing it just to mystify the reader, to impress the reader with your style, then the reader will likely instead resent it by story's end unless there is a perceived payoff.

A few of the examples given seem to skew toward sci-fi or horror or other genres that encourage points of view outside of the ordinary. To make it the crux of, say, a "summer romance at the beach" or something in Loving Wives would be a far taller order, IMO. Wife-swapping where the narrator neglects to mention their own gender and have it turn out to be same-sex couples - Expert Level craftspersonship!

For what little it's worth, in the most recent little story I published here, I decided at the last moment that the gender of "The Client" (a secondary character given nothing to do but be a foil to the protagonist's machinations anyway) wasn't important, so I went back and removed all gender references. This protagonist was established in a prior installment to be bisexual, so it truly didn't matter to the story at hand. I'm not super-experienced, so that was by far enough of a challenge for me. It was just for fun, on a whim, and presumably the majority of readers won't even notice. But to do it as the linchpin of the story would be beyond me, I expect.

* edit - Indeed Britva415 posted almost exactly my questions about 3 minutes before I hit Post, LOL.

The last thing I am aiming for is that type of literary quality. No, the expectations that I have is uncertainty, confusion, and dread. The closest thing I have for a why, which will answer Britva415's question a little, is in the theme itself: the relationship between arousal and fear; a known fear, and an unknown lust, and which one would be the wisest pick in a world of extreme paranoia, as I established such world in an unfinished story: The Woman at the Speakeasy.

Again, the point isn't to publish it. In fact, the more I read this thread, the more I come out knowing that the final product will probably be completely different than the original vision, or maybe I'll derive two products: an expunged version that is "safe" to publish (considering your suggestions that say "don't do it"), and an unexpunged version that shows the original vision (considering the posts that say "this is how I did it/how X did it") that I'll either publish somewhere else with less eyes, or just keep it to myself. I am less worried about the future of this story because I am not putting all my eggs in one basket, okay?

I didn't expect this subject to be so divisive. Just chill. I am looking for advice to experiment, not how I am going to bomb my writing by doing one story that isn't even about making a success out of it. Even if I was, I can't control if people like it or not. I've done things that I didn't expect anybody like them, and I've done things that I hoped for people to like them. That's how my entire portfolio is: a complete opposite reaction to my expectations, hence I stopped caring.