I Write Like

[End Master]

Here's a website that might be of some minor interest.

http://iwl.me/

You copy some of your writing and it tries to analyze who you write like. Probably not very accurate, still it provides some interesting results.

Here's what I got when I posted the first page (or second page in some cases) of my stories.

Tales From the Basement- Chuck Palahniuk
Exploitation Theater- William Gibson
Repression- David Foster Wallace
TRASH- Stephen King
Paradise Violated- Ursula K. Le Guin
Legend- David Foster Wallace
Death Song- George Orwell
Love SICK- David Foster Wallace
Alpha Wolf- Kurt Vonnegut
Imagination- Douglas Adams
Geek- Kurt Vonnegut
Ground Zero- Margaret Atwood
A Very Special Infinite Story- David Foster Wallace
Necromancer- Chuck Palahniuk
Primal- David Foster Wallace

Yeah, I don't really see some of those either!

Looks like I match up with this David Foster Wallace the most even though I didn't really know anything about him until just now.

[Ryan_DuBois]

I did mine room-by-room, and most of the stories were pretty mixed. The most consistent story was "The Occurence in the Forest in the Night", which kept getting Stephen King (I've read a lot of his books, and I really don't see it).

"The Rift", "ExShin", and our current contest story got a mix between a lot of stuff, but were mostly David Foster Wallace and Dan Brown. I've never read Dan Brown's novels, but I tried to read Wallace's "Infinite Jest" and one of his memoirs a couple months ago. I found his stuff extremely boring, so I hope this site isn't accurate!



[EDIT]

Still, for some reason "Infinite Jest" is considered to be like one of the greatest novels; I'm not sure why. What I read of it just had a lot of tennis and pot-smoking in it. Almost no dialogue, too.

[End Master]

I found his stuff extremely boring

Heh, that's sort of funny the site matched me up the most with this David Wallace then, because some guy at CYS recently posted a thread saying I was boring (Said my stories didn't have enough action and were too long).

But then he posted another thread saying I was sick (I guess that would be the Chuck influence), so I assume he was just trolling.

[Ryan_DuBois]

I'd call your stories anything but boring. I still remember when I first came across TRASH years ago (ironically, it was probably one of the few stories on the site that WASN'T trash).

Maybe the story wasn't called TRASH, actually. I'm thinking of the Ebay one.

Anyway, after that I read the one where you cut off a girl scout's head and do the Mexican Hat Dance around her blood-spewing body. Good stuff!

Ya, I'm really surprised that you got matched with David Foster Wallace.

[Dragavan]

I punched in numerous pieces of my work, even multiple chapters of the same story, and got vastly different results. Stephen King, J K Rowling, James Joyce, and mostly David Foster Wallace... it seems to be shill site to sell more David Foster Wallace books, considering how much that one seems to come up for all of us.

I did try and game it a bit by pasting in a number of samples of King, Wallace and Rowling, including some magazine articles and speech transcriptions of theirs, and it got each and every one of them right.

[Hi! My name is: Katie]

I got Ernest Hemingway, Dan Brown, Gertrude Stein, Arthur Conan Doyle.

I'm kind of not feeling the Dan Brown comparison, but that's because I found the plot of Da Vinci Code weak and predictable. The others are pretty cool.

Apparently the guy that made the site is a Russian dude and he only put three books in by fifty different authors. He didn't expect the site to be all that popular, but it is getting a lot of hits now so I think he's going to improve upon it.

It is kind of entertaining though.

[Ryan_DuBois]

I was doing the same thing Drag did, where he put actual passages from the authors' books in there. It got them mostly right -- I think it said Stephen King wrote like Edgar Allen Poe or some one else a couple times, but that was it.

[Usoki]

The Sneeze came out as either Stephen King or Margaret Atwood, and Rentyre got P.G. Wodehouse, with a bit of Mark Twain... but most of my stuff is David Foster Wallace.

Most of my recent works end up being labeled as David Foster Wallace as well, which really does seem to be the default, no result option. I had to start pulling out six year old high school stuff just to get a different result. It came up as Dan Brown, so I think that really says something about how much I've grown as a writer.

[xnull]

http://www.unlikelywords.com/2010/07/16/i-write-like/

[mizal]

I know this site's pointless but I couldn't resist. I pasted the first three chapters from my HOID goblin story and apparently they're like Arthur Clarke, Dan Brown, and, of course, David Foster Wallace.

A piece from a different story I wrote is apparently like J.K. Rowling, so I guess I should send that shit off right away and become a millionaire, huh?

Oh, and sometimes Tolkien writes like Lovecraft.