Life & Wisdom Quote by Ken Follett

Follett’s line lands like a polite slap at a certain species of writer: the guy who treats women on the page as an exotic biome requiring special equipment. The joke is doing real work. By proposing a “monastery” as the only plausible excuse, he reframes the supposed “mystery” of writing women as a self-inflicted problem, the product of isolation, not sensitivity. It’s a demystification with a moral edge: if you can’t write women convincingly, it’s not because women are unknowable; it’s because you haven’t bothered to know them.

The specific intent is practical and corrective. Follett is giving permission to stop overthinking and start observing, but he’s also issuing a challenge to the habits that produce flat female characters: a reliance on stock motives, a fear of interiority, a tendency to treat “female” as a genre. “Talk to them” sounds almost absurdly obvious, which is precisely why it stings. It suggests that many failures in representation aren’t tragic misunderstandings; they’re basic neglect.

Subtextually, Follett is arguing for empathy as craft, not ideology. Research isn’t only archives and Wikipedia; it’s conversation, proximity, the humility of letting another person complicate your assumptions. In the context of popular historical fiction - where women are often squeezed between costume drama and archetype - he’s defending a grounded approach: women as people first, plot functions last. The monastery image lingers because it’s funny, but also because it names the real culprit: a closed system that keeps reproducing itself.