Do male and female authors write differently?

i personally think there is too many factors
writing influences from other writers affect writers
you cant pinpoint a specific trait to a gender
when i read Water for Elephants
i thought a guy wrote it

I think it's more like what gender they're writing for (or who their publishers think they should be writing for). Also, a lot of critics thought Terry Pratchett was a lady after Equal Rites, because it centres around female characters and suggests they are (gasp!) equal to men, and they thought that it was written for ladies.

Wow, necro...

I'll admit I thought Terry Pratchet was a woman, but that's because I know two Terry's, and they're both women.

... huh. Funny that this thread would rise from the grave shortly after I had been thinking that at least one bit of the Harry Potter series made me think that it was pretty obviously written by a woman.

Namely, the whole 'straddling a flying broomstick' thing, complete with violent manoeuvering. Unless all male wizards have thigh muscles that they could use to crack walnuts from age six onwards, that can't be comfortable >.O

Well, with a six-to-four ratio, I apparently write romance like a woman. That's...a good thing?

Hmm. The best sci-fi(ish) book series I have read in recent times, and have re-read as well, sue me, is by Lois Mc Master Bujold, who has said that she creates characters and tries to figure out the worst situations to put them in. I don't really know if that is a female-centric thing or not.

Mind you, it took me a while to figure out J.K. Rowling was a woman when I first heard about Harry Potter - it wasn't well advertised at the time, I recall.

edit. on a purely non-scientific basis, I entered the above text in gender genie.

I am a girl now. Girls are cool.

edited 20th Sep '12 3:18:16 AM by TamH70

In their treatment of female characters, yes. Other than that? Get out.

You have heard of the Vorkosigan Saga then?

Lois Mc Master Bujold, who has said that she creates characters and tries to figure out the worst situations to put them in.

Well, I know an enormous part of the female sections of fandom seems to use this as a way of coming up with fanfic plots, but fanfic and published writing aren't quite the same thing.

I would be certain that Alexander Mc Call Smith was a woman if his name weren't right there on the cover. Particularly in the 44 Scotland Street series. Ditto for Winston Rowntree, though his writing style isn't Smith's low-key wit; he comes off more as a particularly erudite Live Journal user.

So yeah, I'm pretty certain it's at least somewhat of a made-up distinction.

Slightly off topic, but I remember Dave Sim once said (about the whole Laura Croft thing) (and I'm paraphrasing here): "If you have a work that features a strong female protagonist, and you could reverse her gender without sabotaging the plot or the dialogue, then what you have is not a powerful female character, you have a male character in a female body." His overall point was that a well-crafted character will be complex and realistic enough that they could only work as depicted- switch the gender and they would no longer "make sense".

I would assume that if true, then the same principle might apply to the work as a whole.

I really take issue with that sort of statement. Sure, a man and a woman must by necessity have slightly different life experiences, even in a hypothetical perfectly egalitarian society (shaving and nocturnal emissions vs. menstruation and childbirth), but by that standard, you could replace "gender" with any arbitrarily chosen category:

"if you could change a character from black to white without sabotaging the plot or the dialogue, what you have is a white person in a black person's body"

"if you could change a character from Swedish to Russian without sabotaging the plot or the dialogue, what you have is a Russian in a Swede's body"

Sadly, I suspect that Mr. Sim is going by the normal sexist idea that to write a good female character you can't just write a person, you have to write a person with one or more stereotypical "feminine" traits tacked on with no regard to internal logic.

I suspect I'm getting off-topic here, though.

edited 22nd Sep '12 10:29:04 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

"if you could change a character from black to white without sabotaging the plot or the dialogue, what you have is a white person in a black person's body"

Outside of speculative fiction set in a post-racial world, I'd say it's probably true if you could flip the race without it affecting the book in any way.

I don't think anyone has the capacity to imagine a post-gender world, so the contention that a female character who would work completely gender-flipped is a "male character in a woman's body" is likely correct - not about "plot and dialogue" specifically, but about the work as a whole. Women's experiences are not the same as men's experiences, and if a male author is writing a female character as if they were male, it suggests he hasn't put sufficient thought into what it would be like to be a woman.

The core idea that I think is right is that, if you wright about a person who is from a different context than you (gender, race, culture) without thinking about how that would affect them, it's a significant error in storytelling.

(Regarding Harry Potter, brooms have a Cushioning Charm on them, so sitting on them doesn't feel like actually sitting on a broomstick would. /geekery)

edited 22nd Sep '12 2:08:59 PM by WarriorEowyn

Hmm. If switching the gender wouldn't affect the plot or dialogue or the story as a whole, then you wouldn't have a male character in a female body or vice-versa...you'd have a gender-neutral character, which is a whole different thing.

I'm sure male and female authors do write differently...but I haven't a clue what the difference is.

Different people write differently - just like a Swedish person probably writes differently than a South African person, an old Mormon probably writes differently than a young Buddhist, and one middle-aged Canadian teacher probably writes differently than another middle-aged Canadian teacher.

SO...we've established that different people write differently. Are men and women different? Sometimes, yeah. Other times, not so much.

Does it matter? Why would someone's gender affect my enjoyment of their work?

I just read a book self-published by the the guy who does Zompist.com and one of his design goals was to make it irrelevant whether the protagonist was a man or a woman; the narration is in the second person, and the sex scene has instructions along the lines of 'male parts italicized, female parts bolded, pay attention only to the words for your (the reader's) biological sex and preferred sex of romantic partner. Cue sex blah blah blah breasts/chest blah whatever organ/whatever organ". Obviously this is very paraphrased.

I thought Inuyasha was written by a man. Imagine my surprise when I found out that it was written by a woman. Not just any woman, but the most famous female manga writer there is!

She knows her stuff!

This strikes me as more accurate. The other thing seems like it's using a characteristic to define a character, which I've always thought of as a shallow characterization. For some people, their sexuality isn't something that they invoke every minute of every day.

I'll buy that too, but I'll also stick to my larger point that you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily flip any aspect of a well written character.

Well, some aspects of a character might be more trivial than others. For example, a character's eye color isn't normally as significant as their political views are.

Exactly. Some aspects of a character are not as important as others. For a character that is randy 24/7, their gender is much more likely to be a big issue than someone who barely thinks about sex. However, much of it is also going to depend on the world around them and who raised them and how.

edited 23rd Sep '12 2:07:35 PM by Deboss

Weird. I did the Gender Genie thing. It wrongly guessed I'm male, if only by about 200 points.

• Female Score: 4236
• Male Score: 4406

The really funny part: What I put in was the first chapter of my Magical Girl story.

edited 23rd Sep '12 5:31:33 PM by MurkyMuse

I entered a passage from a Dragon Age fanfiction I'm writing into the Gender Genie. The thing spit out a result (rightly) that I am male, by about 550 points. I'm still kind of confused how the word "the" is masculine, though.

Gender Genie? Link?

Heh. I tried the gender genie with various chapters of my Azula Trilogy, and it thought I was male about half the time and female the other half. Mostly, it thought the more action-y scenes were written by a guy, and the more dialogue-heavy stuff (particularly dialogue between only female characters) was written by a girl (I'm a guy, BTW).

edited 23rd Sep '12 5:52:56 PM by MasterGhandalf

Yeah, I think we can all agree the Gender Genie is a total quack.