On a corporate training day, I challenged two teams to climb a mountain.
They didn't necessarily have previous experience, but they all had basic training in the tools & equipment, safety, scaling techniques, etc, & the climb itself was generally considered "do-able". On completion, the team leads were to report to me with their experiences.
The first team lead came to me rather disheveled. She had her hair, which had obviously been tightly bound in the morning, blowing freely around her face if it wasn't plastered down with sweat. She was covered in scratches & scrapes, her clothes loose with patches of grime. She probably would have preferred to sit down at this point, but she was determined to do this last part of the exercise.
"How did it go?"
"That was exhausting! But it was so amazing, too! I've never done anything like that, & the team really pulled together. I think we've taken our trust in each other to the next level. Even from the beginning, where they said not to rush it just because it looks easy, there were times when we could see that a wrong move - a slip - could have brought us all undone. We plodded through, though - we moved as quickly as was safe. We made sure that everyone understood the next challenging bit that was coming up. We'd pause to work out a few scenarios that would get us up steep bits - you know, the sheer wall? - or over the large cracks. We had a few near misses, & my heart was in my mouth more than once - not just for me, but for some of the less able in the team. But we did it. We got to the summit & looked out over ... everything. It was worth it! The repel coming down was a cake-walk by comparison - even if two of the guys got silly & had to be untangled. We all had a laugh over that, & they were a bit sheepish coming down the rest of the way."
I found the second team lead bent double still trying to catch his breath. He looked up with a wicked grin.
"How did it go?"
"I stuck a flag in that sucker!"
From the audience point of view (me), what did I expect of the two team leads? Did I want the detail, so that I could empathise, or did I want the result so that I could simply mark off the success?
Know your audience.
Language is gender-biased. We all know that. It's also gender-identifying. By that, I mean that you can tell from the way someone speaks what gender they are. Sure, you're thinking, the high-pitched ones are more likely female. I mean speaking on paper, too - not writing reports or business correspondence, which is more formally structured (& usually male-oriented), but speaking on paper - telling a story on the page.
One of the keys is pronouns - it's well known in analysing text that a female writer will use more pronouns than a male. Also, there is the detail - the level of detail that a woman will go into to convey more depth, more context. If you like, it's about the nouns, the things that are there, rather than the verbs, the action that happens. The only exception is fight scenes, where men will write endlessly about the 'action' where a woman might touch lightly on the 'violence'.
This was never more obvious to me than when I recently read two series of first-person fantasy novels from one (male) author, then moved directly to two series of first-person fantasy novels from a female author (don't judge my tastes). Obviously, one doesn't do this often, so the revelation - the comparison - of how the (male) main character was portrayed was blindingly obvious in hindsight. Neither author lived the fantasy, of course. Only one of the authors had been a male.
The male author portrayed a series of challenges that his main characters went through, where grim determination, fear, bloody-mindedness or resigned-ness to fate drove the character forward against & through his opposition - often taking a devil-may-care attitude to the next death-defying scenario.
The female author's challenges were thrust at the reluctant hero who always seemed put-upon by events "Oh no - not another damsel in distress!" he might have opined. The hero was the continuing victim of circumstance, with no control over his fate, even though we were told he had a very good survival instinct.
I have a male colleague who love's the male author's works, & a female colleague who has never felt more connected than she does with that female author's works.
Although it would be a generalisation to say that this differentiates authors by gender, I believe that this epitomises authors' gender-oriented viewpoints from life impinging on their writing. Having read a lot of female fantasy authors before (yes, I know), none of them had been written in such a way that the female perspective was applied to a male hero. I can even correlate how this particular male hero acts in a similar way to a female hero in a different (female) author's work I read recently.
It's not a good thing; it's not a bad thing; but, it is very interesting how authors (those who gender-identify) can imbue their characters (regardless of gender) with the author's gender's world-view.
