I Write Like … (Do I Really?)
I thought that I would just share with you this funny link that a member of the writing group I belong to brought to my attention a few months back: http://iwl.me/
This analyser has been fed with the works of various published/well-known authors, and you can let it have a go at any piece of prose that you have written to see which writer you sound the most like. I’m not sure how it does it, but I assume that it is word based and counts words that you and the works of certain authors have in common. It certainly doesn’t look at the plot, genre or sentence structure (or I am a very strange case of lack of insight into the sort of things I write). It is not very accurate for the most part, but I think it is rather funny.
I just ran a few of my stories through it with … interesting results. I am extremely versatile, it seems.
My historical, supernatural NaNoWriMo novel of development from 2009:
A rather serious, supernatural story of a Victorian ex-labrat protagonist that I have been working on for years:
A story set in contemporary Europe with a very colloquial teenage narrator gets the most accurate analysis of them all:
This year’s NaNoWriMo novel:
Apparently there is now a German version available too: http://www.faz.net/f30/aktuell/WriteLike.aspx – I feel almost tempted now to produce something or translate one of my stories into German, just to see.
– And now I am going to get back to my novel writing, although I am going to be taking a break again in half an hour to watch an interview with Bret Easton Ellis on the telly. I’m quite looking forward to it.
PS: Incidentally, this entry is written in the style of Kurt Vonnegut, according to the analyser. I will let you be the judge of that …
Marie Howalt’s Sporadic Blogging 
That was quite interesting.
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Thanks! Did you try to put a text in? If so, I’m interested to hear who you got. 🙂
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Unfortunately there isn’t a Danish version, so I can only test some of my smaller pieces. However, doing that, these are the results:
My “Seven Dreamers” story has me writing like…
Cory Doctorow!!! How’s that for coincidence?
Bigger surprise is, that some of Desde’s story is written as Gertrude Stein would have! Did not see that one coming 😀
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Interesting. I especially like that your got Gertrude Stein. That is … I believe they say “epic” nowadays. 🙂
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Believe me- I was appropriately humbled 😉 And I’m also rather impressed by your “J.D. Salinger”.
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Oh yes, Salinger was impressive. I can see why with that particular story, especially if they have used Catcher in the Rye for Salinger-comparison, but obviously I don’t compare myself to him!
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That’s a fun link. I analysed four sections of my fantasy novel. Two came back as H. G. Wells and two as Gertrude Stein.
Then I ran three sections of my novel set in 1817 Nova Scotia. My returns were David Foster Wallace, Isaac Asimov and Mark Twain.
I think I’m in good company.
Thanks for the link. I’m going to share it with fellow writers.
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You are indeed in good company there!
I’m glad you enjoyed the link and want to share it with others. (If you are into that sort of thing, you may like wordle.net too, by the way.)
Thanks for commenting!
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