How I Write

So a few days ago Wil Wheaton ran his writing through an analytic algorithm and it told him that he writes like Cory Doctorow. Which is cool because Wil loves Cory and they are friends. Today (today being several days later in real time. I've been a bit busy and had this post in the draft queue for a while which you will notice if you go to Sam's blog from this shiny link) Sam Klein's Google+ post about analytics showed up and it told him he wrote like Ursula K. Leguin. So I thought, huh.... I wonder who I write like.

I am fairly certain that I am highly influenced by that which I am reading at the time. And all of the music and TV influences my thought patterns. So I was pretty confident that I would have to do a broad spectrum analysis using a large number of posts. I was right and wrong.

This is the result of the first three analyses:

James freakin Joyce. I hated trying to read him in school because I felt like he missed a lot of key details, that I had to guess what he was saying in the segues because there weren't many that were clear. So I write like someone that I didn't like. That could explain why an ex-boyfriend who read the blog didn't always appreciate what I was saying.

But I got curious. Is this really a great tool with which to judge my work? I mean, couldn't this thing just randomly pull any old name from some magic sorting hat? Would it know the difference between me and another author? Would it know the difference between my moods or be able to detect when I have been influenced by another author?

So I threw a few more samples at it:

For those days when I am feeling particularly persuasive and that the world is jury which must find one or another party as guilty as I find them? Or can I write like... tell I have a bit of a wheeze from all the pollen in the air?



This I don't get at all. A quick wiki-search reveals that I have never read anything she wrote. I do however have a very definitive opinion on what is and is not science fiction and what is and is not what I do even though what it is that I do is exactly what others have said I do, just not exactly how I want what I do described. Sorry Maggie.... The Handmaids tale is science fiction. Speculative fiction is just a fancy way to say "oh yes we have no Tribbles".

I had to look this guy up as well. Sad that he is gone at so young an age with so much to say. He obviously did not know he was not alone in the depression thing. I would argue with I write like on this one but for the title of the essay "A supposedly Fun Thing I will Never Do Again." I believe that Mr. Wallace and I might be kindred. That sounds EXACTLY like something that I would say.

Of course the whole reason that I am even flirting with a site like this is because Wil found it and was so excited that it told him he writes like one of his favorite authors....

This is all well and good. After reading Wil's blog for the last mumble cough years, I realize he has a few different voices too. So I ran four samples of his work that I could tell were of a different tone and quality. And what did I get....

 

Fairly consistently Wil writes like Doctorow or Salinger. I write like I've let Sybil's friends out to play with the ink pens. Now if only I could find a site that would analyze this particular post and tell me which dead psychiatrist to resurrect for a few hundred sessions to deal with each of the people who commandeer my keyboard I'd be golden. :)