Julia & Tania Online Blog

We were looking for information on female perspective versus the male perspective in writing. Instead, we came across an interesting program called “Gender Genie”. It was not exactly what we were looking for, but it occurred to us that this program could be used to test our story’s male/female point of views. We’re sure this program was probably not built to serve this purpose, but who’s to say it can’t be used this way?

    So, going off to find the sections we wanted to test out, we copied and pasted the text written in a male perspective; and did the same with the female perspective. The male point of view was predicted to be male and the female point of view, female. Although this program may be just for fun, it did somewhat settle us, giving us a sort of confirmation that the perspectives didn’t sound too “girly” when it was supposed to be male or too much like a guy when it was supposed to be female.

    Now, curious to see if this program could really accurately determine the gender of the author of a piece of writing, we decided to input a few pages of our formal writing into the text box—as it works best with 500+ words. It seems all our formal writing is significantly male so it failed that test (but then we have sneaking suspicion that analytical pieces would come out male for the objective, informative nature of formal writing—excuse the stereotyping). Then we tested out our blog entries. Out of eight entries, two came out female. It failed that test too.

    Anyway, it might be interesting to see if your writing comes out the way you expect it to come out. At the bottom, we provided the link to this algorithm. Simply input the text into the text box there, select one of the radio buttons (fiction, non fiction, or blog entry) and press the ’submit’ button. We’ve been trying to find some formal writing—essays for example—written by females to see if most of them would come out male and prove our theory right, but have found little—actually next to nothing—published online.

    We’d be interested to hear what you get if any of you have the time to post. Well, have fun!

Gender Genie
An algorithm developed to predict the gender of the author of a piece of writing.

In the past, most of our writing have been in third person point of view. But then one day, we decided we’d give first person point of view a try. As we switched to try the latter perspective, we found how different this was to the former. Not only was it different, but we found ourselves a little baffled as how to begin. So we decided we’d go off and do a little research on writing first person point of view before beginning. In this search for information, we came across some helpful things; and now we hope that this information we’re about to mention will help fellow beginners to begin your story in first person point of view.

  Some of us may think writing first person point of view is as simple as switching a few of those he-said-she-saids in third person point of view to I-saids in first person point of view, and everything else pretty much stays the same. But it’s not quite that simple.

  There are quite a few limitations when writing in first person perspective. One, where we were able to hop in and out of characters’ heads in third person perspective, in first person perspective, we can only focus on the thoughts and feelings of the character telling the story—who we’ll just call Joe. Unless Joe is an empath and is telepathic, all other thoughts and feelings can be mentioned only as speculation based on Joe’s reading of their body language, and cannot be written as fact.

  Second, we can only write what Joe sees. For example, if someone behind Joe is walking towards him, we must remember not to write these actions as if we can see this person approach Joe. We could maybe write that he senses someone’s approach if that is what he senses, but not state it as if he can see the person do it. It is also the same with hearing dialogue. If Joe is not within hearing range, has fallen asleep, or is unconscious then it should not be written.

  The above points seem very obvious, but we mention them because they are very common mistakes when switching from third person to first person point of view.

  There is one other mistake that a site pointed out that was not so obvious however. The mistake they mentioned concerns the phrase: “I blushed”. Can we say “I blushed”? This had to be thought about for a bit we’ll admit. But we soon realised that it cannot be written; because the fact is, we cannot actually see ourselves go red in the face. We can only see this blushing if we are staring at our own reflection in the mirror. So, instead, we should be writing something like: “I felt heat rise to my face”.

  To reiterate, if our character can’t physically be there to witness something happen or hear it then it cannot be written in first person point of view. Anything that is mentioned about other characters can only be mentioned as speculation and should not be written as fact.

  But, if it turns out that the story requires the disclosure of thoughts and feelings of other characters, or the story needs to move to many different locales without our character Joe being there, maybe it’d be best to consider writing the story in third person point of view.

  Having said that, there appears to be one way around it. With appropriate indication, it would seem that it is okay to switch to a different character’s perspective under different chapters, just not during a scene.

  One last thing we will mention is the excessive use of the pronoun, “I”. Excessive use can be very repetitive and boring so we should pay attention to our use of “I” and try to vary sentence structures to minimise this excessive use.

  We are sure that there are plenty more points we should also know, but for now, it is probably enough—it has been enough—to go on to start writing a decent story in the first person perspective without breaking too many rules. So we end it here; and hope that this has been helpful for fellow beginners—even if only slightly.

Happy writing!

Further Reading:

Fiction Factor – Me, Myself and I – Writing First Person Point of View

A good place to go to see examples of how to eliminate excessive use of the pronoun “I”. The site also shows an example of the common mistake people make when writing in first person point of view, and a couple of passages with similar content, written in both 1st person point of view and 3rd person point of view to illustrate their differences.

FictionAddiction.NET – Point of View: First Person

Defines the difference between the 1st person and 3rd person point of views.

BellaOnline: Point of View – Fiction Writing

Another useful site that go into the differences of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person point of view. It also talks about a few pros and cons of writing in the different perspectives.

Write a Novel: 8. Narrative Voice

In the PDF that the page is linked to, it goes into writing 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person point of view. It also talks about verbal tense too.

Digging up some of the fanfictions we have written in the past, we were surprised with the ideas and logics within them. Writing stories with characters and plotlines that are as true to the original as possible was seen in these older creative writing pieces: (although at times they were a little off) the characters in our stories always attempts to be canon and attempts to focus on things other than “fluffy” romances.

  However, we noticed that certain details that needed to be there in order for events to exist and move in a believable manner were somewhat missed in some of the more older fanfictions. The Star Trek: Voyager fanfiction, “Every Crew for Itself“, is one example that had such problems and we are currently re-editing it to make better of the fanfiction. It has a (very) basic storyline—one that we wanted to use to further explore the romantic relationship between the two lead characters in the show.

  Briefly introducing the series the story is based on—Star Trek: Voyager, it is about two crews, both on opposite ends, who are forced to work together to get back home to Earth after an alien technology  approximately 70 000 light-years from Earth catapulted the crews of the Federation Starship U.S.S. Voyager and the Maquis fighter ship into that part of space. Captain Kathryn Janeway is the U.S.S. Voyager’s captain and the former captain of the Maquis fighter vessel, Chakotay, is made to be her first officer after Voyager’s original first officer is killed during the mission. Many of Chakotay’s crew is also integrated into the U.S.S. Voyager crew and both crews work together to not only chart the uncharted part of space known as the Delta Quadrant, but also to find ways to survive and cut their 70 or so-year-journey short and get back home to Earth.

  “Every Crew for Itself“ tells a story about this crew’s encounter with an alien crew whose people are in conflict with another race in the region. They board the U.S.S. Voyager and take its crew and ship hostage. But all doesn’t go well when the apparently stronger, second alien crew also boards the ship. The U.S.S. Voyager is turned into a battlefield. The two alien crews go on an all out battle with each other and the Voyager crew is forced to enter into their conflict—forced to fight to regain control and get the alien crews off of their ship so they can continue their journey towards home.

  The original version of “Every Crew for Itself” did move around a bit and it did try to focus on many different characters—it had a storyline that allowed a few battle sequences (again, very, extremely basic ones with basic trek technobabble!); a storyline that tried to focus on more the adventure aspect than the relationship aspect of the show (since Star Trek is primarily about exploration in space than romance and drama); a little character development between the main characters; and there is a beginning, middle, and an end.

  But we found that the story had minor details that needed to be taken into account for the sake of believability; a few loop holes that just didn’t allow certain events to be possible; and there were some illogical and overly-dramatic scenes that could have been swapped for more logical/less dramatic ones. For example, in terms of believability: the Voyager crew was said to be locked onto an explosive device and one step could set it off, but when the ship got attacked by an alien vessel and the ship jolt vigorously, there was little mention of the crew finding it difficult to keep themselves from setting the explosive device off. An example of an overly-dramatic scene, the depressurisation of an entire deck was used to bring out feelings and emotions in the two lead characters. But this scene could have been swapped for a much simpler and less dramatic event which would have subtly provided the tension needed to bring out the feelings and emotions between the characters.

  We can say that we were just starting out on writing back when “Every Crew for Itself” was written. We were somewhat weak both technically and creatively. Through going through the old fanfictions we realise that being technically great (grammar, punctuation, spelling, and descriptive) is only one part to great writing. The other is finding creative ways that allow a story to move and build so that the story is believable, ‘realistic’, and a pleasure to read. We find sometimes that the latter is missing in stories even when the writer is technically great.

  Along with re-editing past fanfictions, we are also currently writing new chapters to our more recent fanfictions. Having been using fanfiction to hone our writing skills, we have learnt to be always aware of writing something beyond the technical aspects. We still continue to make sure that our stories are not only technically beautiful, but also—if we can make a new descriptive word up—logically beautiful.

“Every Crew for Itself” Star Trek: Voyager fanfiction will be posted soon. Look out for it!