McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Classic Blunders and how to easily spot a female author writing a male charater

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the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
Here are two that from my experience, North American writers writing things set in Europe and particularly Britain pretty much always get wrong:

A hundred miles. It's a long way. A really long way.  Psychologically a long way.  It may only take a couple of hours, but for a contemporary European, or even more so a nineteenth century European, just because you could theoretically do it and back in a day does not at all mean you are likely to or will.

On the other hand, a hundred years ? Is a short time. North Americans have lots of unoccupied space between stuff.  In Europe it's to a first approximation all stuff.  We live among it.  It's not noteworthy to live in a 150-year-old house or to have a thousand-year-old wall still just being a wall at one side of a car park.  Anything in the past thousand years isn't history yet, it's current affairs that aren't finished working out.

Shecky:
Very recently, a select group of fantasy authors anonymously submitted short pieces for a test: a bank of readers were supposed to decide based on the writing whether the author was male or female. Result? The guesses were only as accurate as a random choice between A or B. Random, people.

Gilitine_Memitim:
There is what is considered to be a feminine way of writing and a masculine way of writing even outside of even word choice. There's grammar and sentence structure too. But some men do write what might be considered femininely and some females do write what may be considered in a masculine fashion.

Shecky:

--- Quote from: Gilitine_Memitim on February 10, 2013, 04:21:14 AM ---There is what is considered to be a feminine way of writing and a masculine way of writing even outside of even word choice. There's grammar and sentence structure too. But some men do write what might be considered femininely and some females do write what may be considered in a masculine fashion.

--- End quote ---

I think this is more a function of genre standards + assumptions than of an actual gender-related style.

Shecky:
This is pushing uncomfortably close to a discussion of sexism, and as such is edging into Touchy Topics. Probably best to steer away unless there is a good purpose in bringing it up.

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