I came across another very interesting post by Caroline Furlong which can probably best be described as explaining to women why men’s fiction has so much action and so little emotional talk, but there’s quite a lot more in it—including some interesting discussion of people being trustworthy vs. people who abuse trust, for example—and I recommend reading it in full:

Writerly Sound Bites, Number 17: Too Much Action, Not Enough…Fluff?

Something I think worth mentioning is that people (I do not mean Ms. Furlong) often confuse what takes up most of the words of a story with what the story is about. I think that there’s a very useful analogy to be had, here, from a physical lens: a lens is a large piece of glass whose purpose is to focus a large quantity of light down to a small point. Similarly, a story is very often a large quantity of words whose focus is a scene or two. But the whole point of all of those words is to earn that scene.

This can easily be shown by taking any truly great scene and showing it to someone who doesn’t know the story. It will, invariably, mean nothing to them. Or you can even see this in jokes: if you tell someone the punchline of a joke without its setup, it’s not funny.

The emotional scenes in men’s fiction are much like this: the extremely rare times when manly men talk about their feelings with each other are incredibly important, but only if you earn them by properly setting up the extremely rare circumstances where this is natural and healthy and manly. A really great example of this is the ending of Casablanca. The speech that Rick gives Victor Laszlo is an example of it; in it he tells him how he feels about Ilsa. It’s also subtle but you can see Victor Laszlo tell Rick how he feels; his almost-smile as he accepts what Rick tells him without believing it, and the way he welcomes Rick back to the fight. Much of the ensuing dialog between Rick and Captain Renault conveys how they feel, even if you have to read between the lines see it. But then you get the magnificent final line, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” It is magnificent precisely because it is earned by the entirety of the movie that led up to it.

You can also see this in well-written male characters which are written by women, by the way. Consider Mr. Darcy from Pride & Prejudice. It is precisely his reserve that makes it so striking that he says to Elizabeth, “I must tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” It is this reserve that makes the letter he wrote to Elizabeth so meaningful. It’s what makes this line so powerful:

“If you will thank me,” he replied, “let it be for yourself alone. That the wish of giving happiness to you, might add force to the other inducements which led me on, I shall not attempt to deny. But your family owe me nothing. Much as I respect them, I believe, I thought only of you.”

More properly, it’s his reserve combined with all the rest of what he’s done and what happened, that all of these things are earned and we learn of his feelings in conditions that make it reasonable and manly of him to communicate them in those very unusual moments.

All of this stands in contrast to that women’s fiction which is mostly “fluff.” That’s Ms. Furlong’s term for it, but I think it’s well chosen, because the emotions are mostly very transient—like the lilies of the field, they are here today and tomorrow thrown into the fire. This reflects the feminine orientation toward maintaining a household, which involves keeping track of many people and their current relationships to each other. Speaking as someone who does a lot of this himself because he has three children, you need to keep track of how everyone’s doing because the day-to-day changes in people are significant. When someone is suddenly quieter, there’s a good chance that they’re sick—or have some other problem that they need help with. If they’re suddenly louder, they might have a problem they need help with or they might be getting more caffeine than they realize. If they feel lousy and are lethargic about things that they want to do, they’re probably sick, whereas when they just feel lousy they might be having a stress reaction to something they don’t want to do. Similarly, some problems between kids they need to work out on their own, but some you need to step in and guide them to work out because they’re not doing it on their own and you don’t want to let problems fester. Letting problems fester leads to less well-developed social skills than when you step in and fix the problems they can’t, because people will mal-adapt to bad circumstances. Those women who have a facility for this—and it’s probably most of them—find the application of this facility to fiction satisfying, in a very analogous way to how many men find carving, or woodworking, or beating a video game very satisfying to their facility for problem solving. Thus the fluff—tons of transient emotions on display—gives lots of scope for refining one’s reading of people based on their trivial actions and comparing to the feelings that they express. (This is, of course, an oversimplification of what’s appealing about it to the people to whom it appeals.)