I'm traveling today, wandering around and thinking about the stories I'm writing now. I spend a lot more time thinking than writing, which is part of the reason it can take me a couple of days to compose a sentence. Another reason is that I like shiny toys and the world is full of them.
A week or so ago, a friend reminded me of "I Write Like." It's a shiny toy. You paste in a chunk of writing and it analyses word choice and sentence structure and spitoooee! It tells you which famous author you write like. (For the example below, I pasted in the first 35 pp. of each book)
This is a YA contemporary in progress at the moment...
This is the first novel I ever wrote, also known as the unpublishable book. Damn, I was trying to write like Thackeray.
This is the beginning of something that is formless enough to include both overly-large hats and a sasquatch...
This is BLACK HELICOPTERS.
...and this is CATCH & RELEASE
Turns out THE FREAK OBSERVER and the YA contemporary troublemaker at the top must have some things in common.
So what does it mean? Probably not much. It would be interesting to take, for example, a single Hemingway story and run it through--might turn out that he writes like Jack London.
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