I Write Like...

[Dara]

I saw this tweet by Wil Wheaton and when I read the story, decided to see who I write like. I put in some stuff I wrote for NaNoWriMo and came up with Douglas Adams. Not too shabby! Some other stuff I wrote came up with Cory Doctorow who is also awesome. I thought it'd be cool to see what everyone else gets. I know there are a lot of writers here.

[Wilmar]

Mario Puzo for my 1st book

and

Chuck Palahniuk for my 2nd book.

Uhmm... that can't be good.

[Scott]

For my S&L Anthology story, I got HP Lovecraft

For the story I'm currently working on I got Gertrude Stein.

And for another story I did a while ago, I got Cory Doctorow

And for another story I got Chuck Palahniuk

Can't tell what this says about my writing style.... O.o

[Camilla]

For about 9 chapters of my unfinished book, J.R.R. Tolkien.

As it has been YEARS since I last read LOTR, I fail to identify any characteristics. Except too massive and slow-paced for a 13-year old... o_O

[Glen]

For my latest book, Stephen King. Surprise!

[Seawood]

James Joyce on several samples. Never read any Joyce so I have no idea if that's accurate or not. Apparently my swimming blog is Doctorow-esque, though!

Friend of mine submitted a piece he'd written for a Tremulus game and it came out like Poe. Perfect. :)

[Michal]

Stephanie Meyer.

*Insert howl of despair here*

[[deleted user]]

lol I got Stephanie Meyer once too. For my last Nano piece I got Douglas Adams, for my poem collection it said I wrote like Chuck Palahnuik. That thing is fun every time xD

[Sky]

My S&L short story got Rudyard Kipling and a short story that I submitted for a charity anthology got Cory Doctorow.

A random short that I don't think is really ready for anyone (myself included) to read got H.P. Lovecraft, but when I removed the title section and copyright information, it got Harry Harrison instead. Which, you know, makes perfect sense...

Somewhat amusingly, the first short story I ever wrote got Dan Brown. I'm not really sure what that means for Dan or for me.

[Christian]

For a 1500 word travel blog post I got Cory Doctorow, which now makes me want to go and read my first Cory Doctorow (and catch up on my blog writing), so a win all round...

[James]

Put several short stories into the analyzer and got, in order: Lovecraft, King, & David Foster Wallace. I need more consistency and apparently I'm writing horror and didn't even know it.

[Nicole]

That was entertaining :) I put in five stories and got Arthur C Clarke (twice), David Foster Wallace, Ann Rice, and Margaret Atwood.

[Sean]

So I took a passage from a book I'm writing and plugged it in. The system says I write like Vladimir Nabakov. Very flattering to be sure, but I can't help but harbor doubts about the accuracy of that analysis. I mean, here's the passage:

“Stalker, eh? That’s so romantic.”

You and I use that word in very different ways.

“Such twisted love is the best. Someone shows up on your doorstep at two o’clock Sunday morning with a severed head in a box—”

Very, very different ways.

“—and says, ‘I saw you leaving the club with him last night and I couldn’t stand the thought that you let his hands touch you in ways mine never have.’”

The amount of specificity in this story is disturbing.

“Oh, like this isn’t the plot of every romantic comedy ever.”

I don’t recall any of them featuring severed heads.

“What about School Days? Or that one with Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow?”

Those aren’t romantic comedies.

“With an attitude like that you’re never getting laid.”

Maybe not, but at least I won’t wake up one morning to find I’ve been garroted with my own entrails.

“What a sad, lonely life.”

I don't think any human would ever read that and think, "Hey, this reminds me of Lolita."

[James]

Sean wrote: "So I took a passage from a book I'm writing and plugged it in. The system says I write like Vladimir Nabakov. Very flattering to be sure, but I can't help but harbor doubts about the accuracy of th..."

I was thinking the same thing, Sean. I checked the website, but it didn't have anything about the technique/methodology they use to make the comparisons. If I had to guess, I'd bet that the "comparison" is largely based on word usage. You and Nabakov use similar words, and possibly sentence length, stuff like that. Romantic, lonely, etc. are somewhat Nabakovian. Probably the same for my results of Lovecraft and King. Lots of monsters in my stories.

P.S. - I want to read the rest of this book.

[Ruth (tilltab) Ashworth]

I got Stephen King for one short story and Neil Gaiman for another one. May be a load of rubbish, but I don't mind being compared with those two. Not sure how the novel I'm working on is, in any way, Lovecraftian though. Still, can't complain. :D

[Scott]

That was another thing I was thinking. I wanted to know the methodology, especially since my results were so varied. The three non S&L stories I tried were kind of political thrillers, so if it were largely word choice based I'd think I'd get results like Tom Clancy or Vince Flynn, rather than what I did get lol.

[Sean Lookielook]

I didn't want to be a wet blanket, but the algorithm he has written is not very accurate. The database contains only 50 novels and hasn't been updated in three years. While the appeal of the site is no doubt from being compared to famous writers, the results are no better than if you picked a random book off of your shelf. See the Wikipedia page for more details and what happens when you put those same authors back into the site. It says this comment is like Cory Doctorow, too.

[James]

Yeah, it's a lark, not a reasonable comparison. Might be more interesting if it provided some of the background info to you like why it compared your shopping list to Douglas Adams. It might actually be kind of interesting to develop a website or app that produced some descriptive stats on your writing for you: word frequency tables, average sentence length, etc. Let you know if you use the word "relentlessly" a lot, stuff like that. Something that's a little easier to use than ReadMe anyway. For anyone more interested in the basics of and software for content analysis, this pdf is a little dated but interesting (http://www.ou.edu/cls/online/lstd5913...).

[Sean Lookielook]

James wrote: "Yeah, it's a lark, not a reasonable comparison. Might be more interesting if it provided some of the background info to you like why it compared your shopping list to Douglas Adams. It might actual..."

Or maybe I'm just bitter because it said I write like Stephenie Meyer.

[James]

Yeah, them's fighting words.

[Scott]

Yeah, I'd be bitter about that too