Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Buried in the culture war thread, there has been some discussion about differences between male and female writers, and how one might recognize the gender of a writer without knowing from the name.
Rowling supposedly writes all her male characters like they are girls. Draco is a bully in a mean girl fashion, while Harry falls in and out of love in a manner more similar to women than men. Another pointed out that male stories tend to converge on one point, whereas those written by women tend to move in many different directions. The "men writing women" tropes are also often telltale sign of author's gender.
I figured it would be fun to ask the rest here: Do you see different trends in how men and women write, and do you believe you can reliably tell the gender of a writer from their works alone?
Not writing related, but after looking at a lot of fan art, it's quite easy to tell whether it's a male or female artist. There's a few tells, the main one probably being the way that women tend to put more attention into eyes, and especially hands. The more detailed the hands, the more likely the artist is female. Also the way they draw bodies, women tend to draw different things. For example when drawing "thick" women, a man will draw her with wide with a flat stomach, while a woman will include belly fat that's hanging off.
I don't read very many female writers, and is that the female writers I do read, tend to write in a very gendered fashion, something like josei, for example.
Like I don't think I could necessarily clock Bujold's writing as female. I don't think I could clock Harry Potter as having been written by a woman either, but the last time I read it I was a child, so maybe I'd notice it today.
Overall, I think it's very noticeable in art than and sometimes noticeable in writing. But it really depends on what is being written. Romantasy is written primarily by women, and so the tropes themselves are coded in a specific way, so even if a man would write according to the norms, would you be able to tell? I wouldn't, because I don't read the genre at all.
I believe that a lot of erotica is written by men using female pennames as that helps the books sell better. I would not be all that surprised if the same were the case for romantasy.
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