Female Versus Men's Writing

Discussion in 'The Lounge' started by katina, Mar 3, 2019.

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  1. Iain Aschendale

    Iain Aschendale Lying, dog-faced pony Marine Supporter Contributor

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    Telemachus Sneezed
    Yup. It's a shit translation as well, check out this interview with the translator. You'll know it when you see it.
     
  2. EBohio

    EBohio Banned

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    LOL! Jesus, Man, can you say all that stuff on this forum????
     
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  3. Seven Crowns

    Seven Crowns Moderator Staff Supporter Contributor Contest Winner 2022

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    I read lots of anthologies and usually just jump right into each story. I'll get ten pages in or so and by that point I'm either pissed off or delighted (or bored) and I'll page back to see if my authorial guess was right. It usually is. Then I'll look up the author to see if they're a pro/amateur. I love seeing amateurs knock it out of the park, and I hate, hate, hate seeing a pro write something awful, because they should know better. The jealous part of me assumes they got in on name recognition. The conspiratorial part of me agrees. And the Catholic part says to knock it off, it's Saint Joseph's Day. (Soon, very soon.)

    There are programs that can predict the author's gender with some degree of success. I imagine those are going to be NSA tools or something along those lines. From the linguistic studies I've seen, men prefer concrete details, definite articles, and such, almost like their writing is more absolute, whereas women are more about interconnections. I'm not sure what I was reading. Wish I could look it up . . . I'm betting the algorithms are looking at those.

    The only author who 100% fooled me was Kathe Koja. I knew she was a female author because her name was on the cover, but that book of hers "The Cipher" had a male MC and the narration was 100% male. I'm not sure how she did it. Well, there was one sliver of a scene that lost the trick, but let's ignore that.
     
  4. EBohio

    EBohio Banned

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    Catcher In The Rye is one of my favorites and in it Holden Caulfield assumes that the author of "Out Of Africa" was written by a guy. It was never clear if J.D. Salinger knew himself. If he had watched the movie he would have known it was written by a female (Robert Redford movie way after the book was published). I can't actually put my finger on it sometimes but you just know what the author's gender is sometimes.
     
  5. Some Guy

    Some Guy Manguage Langler Supporter Contributor

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    :) I chose sex because the only other basal and visceral example would have been murder. There's very little to remember about people who tip-toe through life. Women are women. Men are mutated women. Yeah, we're different. Yeah, it shows. It better, because the alternative is even more primordial and slimey. We need to celebrate what we are at the deepest levels, but I don't celebrate murder. So live it up between the pages! Be the woman! Be the man! Stroll boldly and proudly! :D
     
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  6. JLT

    JLT Contributor Contributor

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    Yeah, about that program. I sat in at a writer's seminar some years back, and that subject came up. One of the writers (a man) used to write under multiple pen names, some male and one female. When he ran some samples through a program he found on-line, the stuff published under male pen names came back as "65% certain" that it was written by a male, and the sample from the "female" came back as " over 60%" female. He couldn't explain it, except to say that he was consciously trying to write the latter from "a female point of view," but he couldn't say exactly what the program was using for its determinations.
     
  7. XRD_author

    XRD_author Banned

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    My wife helps keep my female characters female-esque.
    Perhaps there's some male that you could trust to do something like that for you.
    But it's an intensely intimate thing, showing people your first drafts. It can strain a relationship.
     
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  8. Senko

    Senko Member

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    Maybe you can guess correctly many times, especially if you really read a lot. But, aside from that, I do not think there's a way to know for sure.
     
  9. Harmonices

    Harmonices Senior Member

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    :-D
     
  10. Fallow

    Fallow Banned

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    I don't really have a preference, and tend to read SF. Here are the things I have noticed:

    Character development: Female written protagonists go through growth and become something new during the story, while male written protagonists are revealed to be something or accept a mantel they have rejected. Romantic relationships are handled similarly - male authors get their protagonist with the love they always felt like they should have been with (but screwed up), while female authors have their characters discover their love by surprise.

    Female authors will dedicate more time to woolgathering, puzzling and voicing their internal doubts. Male authors will depict surprise or epiphany, but not as much internal processing.

    Complexity of plot and technology tends to be male. Complex social systems, customs or interrelationships trend female.

    Male written books have more technological problems to solve. Female books propose a problem that is more sociological - often about close relationships between species or novel gender relationships.
     
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  11. Cogito

    Cogito Former Mod, Retired Supporter Contributor

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    There is certainly a socialization of gender stereotypes in writing. Statistical analysis of fiction will make decisions based on those socialized biases as they are expressed by the author's writing. On the other hand, a larger proportion than you would expect of romance fiction is written by men, using female pen names and writing for an audience of primarily women. I strongly suspect that analytical programs would incorrectly identify those male authors as female. That would be skewed even further by the fact that romance publishers enforce strict guidelines on the structure and voice of romance fiction they will accept.

    This does not mean that women and men inherently write differently. Any writer with a target audience will tend to adapt his or her style to that audience's (socialized, assumed) tastes.
     
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