Do male and female authors write differently?

That reminds me of something that happened in a creative writing class I took, once. One student submitted a (rather well-written) story that happened to use The All-Concealing "I". Nowhere did it mention the main character's gender; however, during the course of the story, the MC was hit on by a Dirty Old Man who was implied to be some kind of sea god. Due to one of his lines (remarking on what a shame it was that the MC had a girlfriend), there were strong arguments on both sides as to whether or not the MC was a woman ("Darn, she's a lesbian") or a man ("Darn, he's straight"). And since the authors weren't allowed to contribute to critiquing sessions until they were completely over, we never did find out what gender the MC was... (The author was male, though.)

Bradbury is very much a romantically-minded kind of guy. He gets stereotyped as science-fiction, but his science is notoriously soft. Most of his stuff is more like fantasy with science fiction trappings, or just outright fantasy. With the occasional loosely autobiographical piece.

I don't think it's useful to think about badfic like My Immortal or Thirty Hs when discussing questions like this. I mean, it's not like you need to seriously identify with the characters or the plot to be able to write something like that. I'm female, and I could probably write ridiculously over-the-top violence just as easily as ridiculously over-the-top wangst and romance. In fact, I would find it much more fun to write something like Thirty Hs, and probably wouldn't be too surprised if it turned out to be a Troll Fic by some woman. You don't have to care or take it seriously - just turn your brain off.

As we've seen, when it comes to serious fiction, the lines are much more blurred, and plenty of us have guessed wrong about the gender of the author. I'm curious about the method this computer program uses. Does it just measure the frequency of words like "love" and "beauty" over words like "kill" and "maim"?

I've never noticed any significant differences in writing,except that there are more male fantasy writers than female sci-fi writers,and more female authors with male leads than the other way around.

But there's nothing remarkably different,I've come across plenty of books by guys in first person,and plenty of third person books by females

Nobel-winning writer says men write better than women.

(Let me clarify: I don't agree. I just thought it was relevant, because he also says he could understand if something was written by a woman or not.)

edited 10th Jul '11 4:36:25 AM by StrangeDwarf

There are not enough Picardpalms in the world.

I think it calls for the "facepalm made of facepalms" macro, really.

Or the quadruple-facepalm — as in the one where the guy grows two extra arms just to facepalm more.

I ran bits of my novel through the Gender Genie and it returned five out of seven as male.

Although, to its credit, the chapters are all narrated by different characters, and six of the seven are male, so it correctly identified the gender of all but one of the narrators, indicating that the test just looks for whether it sounds male or female.

Either that or I'm just that good

Fascinating. I got male when I put in my blog entry. By about ten points. Guess I'm just that androgynous.

edited 10th Jul '11 4:54:02 PM by MrAHR

Tried it on eight of my stories. Seven of them came out female.

Granted, seven of them were romances, but the one that came back as male was a romance, too—it just had two guys talking in the Framing Device. For that matter, a story with no female characters came back female as well.

edited 11th Jul '11 12:43:56 AM by feotakahari

Words: 4727

Female Score: 8680 Male Score: 5582

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!


Words: 798

Female Score: 919 Male Score: 975

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Ah. Good last minute save.


Words: 3584

Female Score: 5545 Male Score: 4042

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

Okay, fuck this test. I mean, accuracy aside, what's that with "feminine" and "masculine" words?

Apparently, my fiction is mildly feminine (difference of ~100 points in a ~2000 word stories), but my nonfiction is butch as all fuck (1200 on a four-paged sociology paper).

Call me skeptical, but I'm not sure this is any more credible than the "I write like" test.

edited 11th Jul '11 9:44:45 AM by Sparkysharps

Put in three short pieces I'd written and got pretty heavily male scores on all. Curious, I guess, considering I've been repeatedly mistaken for female on the 'net.

@ Freezair: That's more or less what I thought.

Huh. Putting in snippets from my various works, the ones in which I spent a lot of time dwelling the character's emotions and thoughts were very 'feminine'. The ones in which the characters did physical things were all 'masculine' but only just.

So... women write about emotions, men write about action, seems to be what it's saying?

edited 13th Jul '11 2:10:54 AM by LoniJay

put in the prologue and first two chapters of my work in progress. Prologue came out "Male" but chapters came out "Female"

They don't necessarily write differently - I would say that most don't. However, there are some male authors whose style is distinctively male, in the sense that they don't know how to write realistic female characters and are not good at writing relationships generally. (Asimov is one example; I think he actually admitted it. The Robot series lacks good female characters. The Foundation series...is very, very, very plot-focused rather than character-focused, which comes from writing a series that occurs over millennia rather than years. I don't think there are many female authors who would write something like the Foundation series.) Also, if a book has no significant female characters aside from love interests, you can typically assume it's written by a guy. The converse doesn't work for identifying female authors because there are no books without any major male characters.

EDIT: Thanks for the formatting help.

edited 15th Jul '11 3:39:50 PM by WarriorEowyn

We don't use html markup here...

When you make your posts, there's a button at the top left of the screen that says "Show Markup Help"... It'll show you how to do all the formatting properly. I'd tell you how to italicize things but it's kind of hard to explain.

Anyway, to be on topic, I don't really think there's as much of a difference as people are inclined to say. Or if it is, that it's statistical and should not be treated as true in every case.

I always gave Asimov the benefit of the doubt. His earlier novels show he can't write male characters any better than female characters. But I love that his novels contain no realistic characters, and rather just contain aspects of his own personality arguing with perfectly rational voices. It is, indeed, part of the charm of reading his novels.

: Kiki Strike.

I think the entire first book has maybe... one male speaking role? In one chapter? Maybe?

edited 17th Jul '11 12:44:29 AM by FreezairForALimitedTime

@ 80: Yeah, I read that.

As I once heard someone say: I'm too busy being contemptuous to be offended. Not only is V.S. Naipaul a yammering douchenozzle, but Margaret Atwood beats him hollow.

And Gender Genie seems to think I'm a guy.

edited 18th Jul '11 3:34:36 AM by FarseerLolotea

Fun fact: The Silent Hill movie originally had only female characters in it, both good and evil. Rose (the main character), Sharon (her missing daughter), Cybil (the cop), Alessa (evil counterpart of Sharon in a sense, hard to explain) and Christabella (the villain).

The script was returned to the male writer with a note: "There are no men!" So the husband character, who some critics decried as useless and unimportant to the story (I disagree), was added.

edited 18th Jul '11 11:51:19 AM by BonsaiForest

Hmm. Interesting. Not sure what to make of it in the greater scheme of things, but interesting nonetheless.

Also: Gender Genie thinks that my husband writes like a chick.

I ran several chapter of my fanfiction through the Genie, and for most of them it thought I was a girl (I'm a guy, if the fact that my username is based on a male character didn't tip you off). Of course, I'm a guy who likes to write about female protagonists, which might or might not be confusing it. In any case, I'm not sure how reliable it is...

I've done it with a few different things. My results vary. Apparently my conversational and explanatory writing styles are masculine on average. My narrative writing styles vary apparently which makes sense I guess seeing as I use different ones depending on what I am doing...

edited 19th Jul '11 12:34:18 AM by Aondeug