Male and Female Authors

Whenever somebody shows me a piece of writing and I don't know the author, I play a simple game: is the author male or female? I'm pretty good at this game, but considering the details surrounding it, I wish I wasn't.

The reason I started this game is that I noticed a pattern. Every time I had to read something in school and it was the most boring, painful, and annoying thing I've ever read, I wondered who wrote it. Every time, it was a woman. Once I realized that, I started playing the game. I find that every time I am similarly pained by a piece of writing, it has a female author.

It is not that I dislike women. I'm not that misogynistic. What happens is that women seem to use a style of writing that I disagree with far more often than men do. This is not so much a gender thing as it is a style thing. I don't hate Jane Goodall, Barbara Kingsolver, and Anne Lamott because of who they are. I hate them because of how they write.

This so-called female writing style is a combination of preachy and ditzy. The preachy part is that when they have a point to make, they shove it down our throats and make no apologies for it. Any time they entertain a counterargument, they ignore all of its actual points and use some trivial aspect of it to fuel their own flame. Kingsolver's essay collection Small Wonders is a prime example of this. It is not discourse in any meaningful way, just soapbox grandstanding. It belongs in a journal or a blog at best, but not a published book.

The ditzy part comes from the random and not helpful flights of fancy that these authors take. To continue picking on Kingsolver, every essay I read in Small Wonders started the same way: she is sitting in her kitchen, looking at some flower outside of her window, thinking about something. This scene doesn't set a mood, nor does it add anything to the point or argument that is made later on. It is like she is announcing how an essay came to her in the essay she's writing. That would be like going to a movie that started with the director telling you how he came up with the movie you are watching. If I wanted to know that, I would either find an interview or I would by the DVD with commentary on it.

The superfluous information takes other forms, though. Female authors tend to spend the most time describing a location or a feeling. It is not superfluous to know some basic information of where characters are and what they're thinking, but there is a point of saturation where the story is slowing down because of excess information. There is also a problem where an author will bring up a tangential story that may vaguely pertain to the original point, but is so extraneous that the actual point is lost, or at least drowned out.

Now, I did not title this post "Female Authors Suck" and I did so for a reason. What I am saying is that there are certain styles of writing that really rub me the wrong way. Women are more prone to using that style of writing. However, this is a personal opinion. I prefer writing that has more action and less description. When somebody is making a point, I want them to get to the point. Different people, though, have different tastes.

If you want something that is "confident, but not too serious" or if you want something "thoughtful and emotional", you may just hate a lot of men's writing. We could be seen as cold in our rationality. We could be seen as to focused on the end-result. We could be accused of not stopping to smell the roses. If all of these things are problems for you, I would understand if you hated men's writing.

What I want you to get out of this is that writing styles come from within. Our writing is who we are. Women tend to have certain aspects of their writing in common because they have a gender in common. Just because one person doesn't like your style doesn't mean it's wrong. It just means your style is wrong for them. You may need to edit and revise your work, but you should never change who you are just because one person doesn't like it.