Narrator is different gender

[Basil2021]

I’m finally getting going on this idea I’ve had for a long time. I’ve written lots of chapter ones of stories before, however feeling a bit more confident with this one. The only thing is that the narrator, who is the main protagonist, is male, much older than me, whereas I’m female. Is this a problem? I know there’s so much anxiety over gender etc in the media etc, I’m probably getting massively ahead of myself but would this lessen my chances of getting published? Both me and the main character are from a similar background and ethnicity.

Why would it be a problem? All the first short stories I had published had male first-person narrators (I’m female and was much younger then than they were). My first novel was narrated by someone of a different nationality who’d died long before I was born.

My novel has a first person narrator, a teenage boy. I am not, and never have been, a teenage boy. It’s not a problem at all; the only slight difficulty was going through the text to eliminate all the middle aged woman speak that had slipped in! My publisher did suggest I use initials rather than my first name, that was all, which I was perfectly happy with.

Some of my favourite books are written by a female, with a male first person narrator. No reason why not, as long as it's done well.

It's fine - many books are narrated from the POV of someone with a different age/sex than the author. As pp says, as long as it's well-written, it's fine.

If you have beta-readers, you could ask them particularly to focus on whether the persona of the middle-aged man is convincing, but really, unless your novel is autobiographical, as a writer you are always going to be inhabiting a different persona when you narrate from a character's POV.