I Write Like
I do, in fact, have better things to do but narcissism prevails, so I spent some of my hard-earned time fooling around on a website called, I Write Like, that analyzes bits of your writing and tells you what famous author you are subconsciously mimicking. Or something.
Copying, at random, my recent post Hazy and pasting it into the field, I was informed that I write like P.G. Wodehouse, which will come as a surprise to my faithful readers.
Intrigued, I pasted in a couple paragraphs of the short story Bowling Night I posted a few months back and the result was Chuck Palahniuk, which also surprised me since I thought my writing was bad, not gay.
Not yet satisfied, I analyzed my post about camping and was rewarded with the Jack London label. "Hmm," I thought, "I think I see the man behind the curtain." Write about the Great Outdoors and you get lumped in with London. Write about two guys bowling and it's Fight Club revisited. Then, it dawned on me: this website doesn't really have dozens of editors reading my stuff, appreciating all 50 shades of nuance and concerting among themselves to classify my oeuvre. They're cutting corners here.
So, armed with this hypothesis, I decided to test the algorithm. I returned to Hazy and presented it paragraph by paragraph. First paragraph: Rudyard Kipling. Really? Oh, it's the horse, Thunder, that's throwing it. Clip that part out and I write like Neil Gaiman. Unfortunately, I don't know what to make of that since I don't know who he is.
Second graph: Arthur C. Clarke. Curiouser and curiouser. Third & Fourth, I'm back to Chuck Palahniuk. Must've been all the puking. Fifth and Sixth and now I'm akin to Dan Brown, so I guess I suck but I could still make millions. But put it all together and I'm Jeevish to the core.
Who knows what to make of this...is there method behind the madness? Should I simply "Write Like No One is Reading"? Probably, since that's the case, but still, I seek validation. I'm only human. I have my foibles.
As a final test, I copied and pasted the Humungus' recent post Antediluvian. The Humungus writes like Cory Doctorow, which I think is the result you get when they don't know what the hell to make of your writing.
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