I’ve always admired writers like George R.R. Martin and Peter V. Brett for one reason above all: they write with incred­ible empathy.

Most of my career has been made in the binary, rules-first world of the mil­i­tary and law enforce­ment. Trying to iden­tify with people isn’t what you’d call a strong suit in my line of work. You break the law, we enforce it. Our com­mander gives us an objec­tive, we carry it out. Time and effort is put into thinking-like-the-enemy, but almost never into feeling–like-the-enemy.

That’s cold. But it’s also nec­es­sary. Mil­i­tary and law enforce­ment has to be a tool of the civil­ians that direct our efforts. We can’t be second-guessing the will of the people. That way lies mil­i­tary coup and the kind of regime that cur­rently rules in Myanmar.

But it’s not a good per­spec­tive if you’re a writer. I’ve said this before about Martin: he’s never served in the mil­i­tary, yet he writes war­riors who are so con­vincing that if someone told me he was a vet­eran ghetto brawler, or had done a spin (Jordan style) in Vietnam, I’d believe them. He writes women that are so plau­sible that I some­times wonder if he might secretly be a woman.

Empathy, the ability to really sink into the skin of people who are unlike you, to shed your own pre­con­cep­tions and lose your­self in the mind and heart of another, is a crit­ical skill for any serious writer. If you’re going to make your char­ac­ters live and breathe, you’ve got to know them as well as you know your­self.  And believ­able char­ac­ters are the heart of any good story.

And this is my con­stant fear when I write. I’ve spent my entire life training to judge, to exe­cute. That is exactly what you don’t want to do when you’re a 30-something white guy trying to step into the role of a woman, or a black guy, or an older person, or a child, or someone who doesn’t have the same body type, reli­gious beliefs, polit­ical lean­ings. Without empathy, mil­i­tary sto­ries run the risk of being oorah-paeans of praise: where a cultural/gender stereo­type of the tri­umphant Amer­ican war­rior marches on to vic­tory, flag waving behind him. It’s High Noon. It’s A Bridge too Far.

Those are great sto­ries. But they’re not the story I tried to write in the SHADOW OPS series. I des­per­ately want my work to stand up to scrutiny by women, for them to see them­selves reflected in my female char­ac­ters and to feel that I got it right, the same way I feel when I read a Jaime Lan­nister chapter by Martin. The truth is that I’m largely a stranger to a wide range of expe­ri­ences women have every day, the myriad of things large and small that shape who they are and why they want the things they want. I believe there is an expe­ri­ence out there that is uniquely and uni­ver­sally female. I have tried really, really hard to per­ceive it and under­stand it, and I’m con­tin­u­ally ter­ri­fied that I’ve failed.

Only time will tell. Sooner or later, my work will be trotted out before you, and you’ll see for your­self whether my female char­ac­ters res­onate, or whether they will come across as men with female names.

There are so many aspects to good writing that I sweat over. Some, I feel solidly con­fi­dent about. I am a dis­ci­plined person. I am a hard-working person. I am a cre­ative person. I am an imag­i­na­tive person.

Am I empa­thetic person? I dearly hope so.