I write like...

Have you found this site of the day yet. You put in a few paragraphs of your work and it analyzes it to see a comparable author. The site was developed by a Russian software developer for whom English was not even his primary language, and there are only 50 books in the base, but it's fun for a try. Putting in some of my reviews I write like anyone from Shakespeare (wahoo) to David Foster Wallace to Arthur C. Clarke to Dan Brown. There was one James Joyce in there too, but I did have a few run on sentences.

http://iwl.me/

A couple of relevant links:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/94889
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/17/i-write-like-website-goes_n_650037.html

Robert

It's such a delightful time waster, isn't it?

I dabbled a bit too. Added some random paragraphs from my unpublished novels. David Foster Wallace seems to be the common denominator, although I did get results for Dan Brown, William Gibson, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephenie Meyer, and Dan Brown Ya hear that publishers! I'm an untapped goldmine!

I submitted a portion of a blog I'd written about Wimbledon, and I got David Foster Wallace. I guess we know how it works now, eh?

I got Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Bram Stroker, H P Lovecraft and Cory Doctorow.

The first two based on book reviews (both my first and my latest). The third based on a post on a thread here on LT. The last based on my FaceBook post.

I've read one Bradbury and on King. And very little Horror or Sci-Fi Fantasy in general.

Perhaps I should start.

I got James Joyce. Out of curiosity, I entered in the few paragraphs from the last cover letter I sent with a resume. I got Margaret Atwood. Doesn't really make me want to go read her books.

Since people evidently aren't reading the links: it doesn't analyze your writing. It just matches words.

As a result, it depends more heavily on what you write about than on how you actually write.

It is totally random. You can enter the same thing a bunch of times and get different results. You can enter work by the writers in question and get different results.

David Foster Wallace, of course.

Marcus Welby, M. D.

I write like Snoopy.

It was a dark and stormy night....

1:

Oy, I just tried that I Write Like site out (for fun, of course, it's a rainy evening)...plunked in a few paragraphs from chapter 1 of Dusty Waters and I wound up with Nabokov...Zoiks! I not sure what I think of that...it's good, but almost intimidating. I think I'm done playing with that...

9> I tried that, it returned the same author repeatedly for the same piece of writing. From what I've heard from other people 8 is right, I think it is word choice.

facebook had a quiz which told you which Roman/Greek God you were ... I came out as Poseidon; which I have since ascribed to ticking the box "do you like to swim?".

I write like Daniel Defoe. I also write poetry, which I did not submit to iwl.me.

I once received an angry rejection letter from a magazine editor who described my short story as "too Proustian" to publish. I saved it because it's the most entertaining rejection I've ever gotten.

"Too Proustian"? Well, maybe the magazine was satisfied with something more crappily mediocre, since Proust was one of the masters of the French language.

Thank you for that fun site . It is very encouraging for a beginner writer like myself to be compare to (Dan Brown). Wish I could exchange with other writers or create a group to encourage and challenge all you readers to write. I have yet to find any such group on LibraryThing.com. By the way, I am new and really enjoy all your comments. I hope I can learn to navigate on this site real soon... so I can chat some more.

Majerin, if I read you correctly you might be interested in these groups for writers:

http://www.librarything.com/groups/writerreaders
http://www.librarything.com/groups/hobnobwithauthors
http://www.librarything.com/groups/writersbragandragbag

Or you can search groups for 'writers' for something more specific to your needs.

Have fun,

Robert

i write like...
someone struggling through a phud and wondering how he made interesting ideas quite SO turgid.

Well, I gave it a series of writing samples. I started out as Anne Rice, then James Joyce then Vladimir Nabakov, but I landed on H. P. Lovecraft three times, so I guess he's it. I really, really despise H. P. Lovecraft.

First, I got Margaret Mitchell then H.P. Lovecraft. I'll take option B, please.