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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?
One of the tells is in perspective towards the protagonist.
Read "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Hemingway. It's written in the third person, technically, but the omniscient narrator is really just talking about himself - the protagonist. It's about as first person as the third person can get. The "camera," as it were, would be POV. The protagonist (and author) are mostly relating their perspective on and actions within the world. The reflection back to the character himself is minimal, even during passages that are deliberately supposed to be so.
Female authors tend to have the "camera" pointed back at the protagonist in an outside in situation. We see the protagonist in constant relation to the world and the perceptions of others. A common meta-pattern is a paragraph about the protagonist dealing with another character in order to reveal their own traits. A (made up on the spot example); "She had always been independent to a fault. She could remember her own mother saying 'if you always walk alone, you're gonna end up alone!'" I see things like this dropped in all over the place in female writing. A trait, belief, or aspect of a character is only tangible if it came from some sort of interaction with another character or with a kind of "characterization" of the world at large (again, little things -- "She knew men looked at her with a mix of awe and ...") There's no self-directed volition. There has to be an external instantiation first.
And I do think that this reveals some deeper truth about male versus female sense-making. Even when it comes to personal self-knowledge, women place more (though not total) weight on consensus mechanisms. Men can self-define on their own better, however, this can create its own failure mode in terms of failing to appreciate social feedback.
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