#ben blatt

Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing by Ben Blatt

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« Classic [and modern] literature by men is about men by a quantifiable and overwhelming margin. Classic literature by women is about women more than men, but it’s within a short distance of an even split. 

• Of the 50 classic books by men, 44 used he more than she and 6 did the opposite. • Of the 50 classic books by women, 29 used she more than he and 21 did the opposite. • Of the 50 recent New York Times bestsellers by men, 45 used he more than she and 5 did the opposite. • Of the 50 recent New York Times bestsellers by women, 17 used she more than he and 33 did the opposite. 

Saying most authors just prefer to write about their own gender would be an oversimplification. The most female-focused books are nowhere near as lopsided as the extreme male-focused books. The Prime of Miss Brodie was 21% he and 79 % she. That’s the extreme example on the female side. Meanwhile, a book with the opposite split—79 % he and 21 % she—is in the middle of the pack on the male side. There are twenty books with more extreme male ratios. [...] And once again, in the New York Times bestseller list and the modern literary sample, no female writer ever went so extreme as to use less than 20 % he. The same cannot be said of male writers. »

To write his new book, Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve, journalist and statistician Ben Blatt loaded thousands of classics and contemporary best-sellers into various databases and let his hard drive churn through them. He wanted to know if our favorite authors follow conventional writing advice about cliches, adverbs and exclamation points (they mostly do); if men and women write differently (yep); if an algorithm can identify a writer from his or her prose style (it can); and which authors use the shortest first sentences versus those who use the longest.

We can hear thousands of monocles dropping into thousands of cups of Earl Grey from here. "But what of literature?" you sputter. "What does any of that technical folderol have to do," — here you start wiping your monocle on your nosegay — "with ART?"

Not much, is the answer. Blatt's book isn't terribly interested in the art of writing. What it is fascinated by — and what’s fascinating about it — is the craft of writing. Here are some of our favorites of Blatt's findings.

Our fictional universe also turns out to contain words that male authors use to describe female characters but which a woman would rarely use to describe herself or another woman. These words seem to highlight the biggest differences in how male and female authors view the world.

One key word here: interrupted. In each of our three categories (classics, popular fiction and literary fiction), male writers are at least 75% more likely to have their female characters interrupt than their male ones. Meanwhile, female authors didn’t discernibly differ in the frequency with which they have their characters of both genders interrupt.

Similarly, female authors use sob at about the same rate for their male and female characters—but male writers hardly ever use it to describe their own male characters. Male authors seem, consciously or not, to hold that if “real men don’t cry,” then “fictional men don’t sob.”