First-Time Novelist Constantly Asking Wife What It's Like To Be A Woman

August 3, 2005 | Issue 41•31

"Becky is an indispensable tool in my writer's tool chest," Kitner said. "I feel like, with her, I'm able to get under Vivian's skin."

Kitner referred to his heroine, Vivian Drake, a 26-year-old ingenue who is "thrust into a steamy underworld of intrigue and danger in Low Jack."

Best-selling writer Tom Clancy, author of Without Remorse, said Kitner is lucky to have Becky as a source of reference.

"I worked alone in my study for years on The Bear And The Dragon before I realized my female character Lian Ming was dead on the page," Clancy said. "If only I'd had someone like Becky around to answer some questions. It might have helped me figure out how women think."

Clancy said he hopes Kitner can unlock the mystery of writing female characters, something no male novelist has ever been able to do.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and literary critic John Updike agrees.

"Someone should have thought of asking these questions earlier," Updike said. "If only Tolstoy had thought of this, Anna Karenina might have been a more memorable novel."

Updike added: "John Kitner's quest is a part of a larger one: how to write a character who is different from yourself. If he can find the magic key to this age-old puzzle, he will usher in a renaissance in human literature. For the first time, crime novelists will be able to write convincingly about murderers, even if they are not murderers themselves. Non-spies will be able to write about spies. In this new type of literature, there will actually be characters who are something other than novelists. Imagine the possibilities."

Kitner shares these high hopes for his work, but his wife, who has had an opportunity to read some of his early drafts, said it "still needs a lot of work."