Do male and female authors write differently?

This and this.

I don't know? Do male and female authors use the toilet/tree differently?

Dostoevsky is perhaps the introspective author. Seems so to me, anyway.

Kafka too is hardly an objective, cold and empty chronicler.

Btw, I just started reading Thirty H's. Wow. It is actually amazing. It's like if Frank Miller was self-aware in some small way. It's like if Michael Moorcock wrote Warhammer 40K novels while on an aggressive cocaine binge during five brief minutes of partial mental clarity. <3.

Thank you for introducing me to this.

Can we all just f-reaking- drop this? Forever? You're not going to get any meaningful correlations because if there are, they happen on a scale too massive to apply to an individual. If "Female" and "Male" were just personality types, this would all be ok, but they're not. People are going to expect you to be one or the other based on circumstances outside of your control.

We, as a society, need to move beyond this, and it starts by realizing that these comparisons are unnaceptable even on a small scale.

Do -darkies- write better than -chinamen-? Should I write about fried chicken and rice if I want them to read my books? I dunno, let's have a serious discussion and let's nobody point out how unacceptable it is.

(-I'm editing this because I think a serious argument is going to be erased for offensive language-)

edited 24th Jan '11 9:55:32 PM by DaeBrayk

^ Thank you for saying this so I don't have to.

Edit: Perceived "differences" people find between male and female writers are most likely to be confirmation bias on the part of the reader. Many people have strong beliefs on gender roles, and they'll only take note of what confirms their biases about those roles. "Oh, women just write mushy emotional crap and characters sitting around drinking tea and talking about their feelings."

Yeah, no.

If a writer is talented, they have their own voice, their own style. Voice and style are distinctive, they are what distinguishes good or great writers from other writers. Great fiction would'nt have very distinctive voices if men and women were trapped (by biology somehow? This crap has never made sense to me.) into writing the same way. Bad fic reads like every other bad story you've read before, no matter the gender of the writer. That's a big part of the reason it's badly written fiction—it's so samey.

edited 24th Jan '11 11:46:46 PM by MildGuy

I agree wholeheartedly, but at the same time I realize that all my favorite writers are male (Neil Gaiman, Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh). I wonder if that's just a coincidence.

This is silly.

This is another of those situations where I compare what I do to what I'm expected to do because of my gender, and I wind up feeling weird. I mean, I often start by developing characters before I even have a plot to fit them into. Does that mean I need to turn in my masculinity card or whatever?

(And I just know someone is going to post in response to that and say "Yes.")

Yes.

(Sorry. I couldn't resist.)

I'm female, and I quite often have the problem of having a well-developed plot idea and no characters to put in it.

I'm female and I have the opposite problem!

Anyway, personally I haven't seen much difference in the writings of men and women. The only exception I've seen was in poetry. I was studying the poems of a woman, who wrote mostly about women being free with their affections and not confining their desires just because of society's rules (which was near blasphemous at the time - the beginning of the 20th century). My point being, I doubt and have yet to see a man writing poems about women's rights and needs, without it being a love poem.

I used to think I could tell an author's gender from their writing, but my guesses were almost always wrong. So just going from personal experience, I'd say most of the difference is imaginary.

To OP: YES

For all the obvious reasons. Bye.

Hypothesis: For any given randomly-selected group, the average writing quality is roughly inversely proportional to the strength of the difference between the average male's writing and the average female's writing.

Took me a moment to get that, but I laughed when I did.

Probably the only difference that would exist would be about how to write romance/relationships and/or Male Gaze / Female Gaze. Apart from that, there wouldn't really be a reason for a gender-specific writing style.

Its incredibly silly to make generalisations like this based on gender.

Dae Brayk: I'm curious what's unacceptable about this. Nothing was said about the quality of female vs. male authors. No one suggested that female or male writers should be forced to write in a certain style. It was just noting that female writers are more likely to write one way and males another.

I don't see why it offensive to discuss possible gender differences. And if these differences are a result of societal pressures, then it seems like an even better reason to discuss it.

On the OP: I find it interesting that I fit one of the "male" traits (I always write in third person) but I also tend to focus heavily on characters, which is considered a "female" trait.

Is it a statistically proven fact that more first person fiction is written by women than by men? Or is "more women write in first person and more men in third person" a generalisation with no factual support?

edited 12th May '11 10:49:59 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

According to the OP, a computer program was able to correctly tell in 70%-80% of the cases whether the author was female or male. Other factors aside from gender may have influenced the results, such as societal pressures, when the texts were written and the genre(s).

edited 12th May '11 11:10:35 AM by LadyMomus

In college, I had a project for statistics where I compared a random sampling of independently-written fiction (as opposed to professionally published), and compared writing styles (first- versus third-person, for instance) and gender. There, I saw a definite relationship between gender and narrative voice.

But my study may have been skewed by where I was getting the fiction from. I admit it was far from perfect.

Talented writers would probably beat that hypothetical machine. I just recently read NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro, the book was in the point of view of a female protagonist, and written with a supreme amount of realism and had me wondering if the author was truly male or female.

Writing has always been about "stepping into someone else's shoes" in some way.

Heh, I once read a nonfiction book that I thought was by a man until the author referenced (her lack of) makeup. Then again, the author in question is a lesbian, and came off pretty butch, so I'm not sure that counts.

"It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male."

-Robert Silverberg on Alice "James Tiptree Jr." Sheldon

I think there's more of a split between how young people write and how older people write. Not just the vocabulary, but the whole weight-of-experience thing.