Who author do you write like?

I found this site http://iwl.me/ and if you copy and paste at least a few paragraphs, it tells you what author you write like. Oddly enough it gave me Harry Harrison.

 

I've always been afraid to use this site, since I was 97% sure I'd get someone awful.

I got Raymond Chandler, who I've never heard of before, but reading a preview of one of his novels on Amazon I can kind of see it. His descriptions are much nicer than mine are, though.

 

Each of my short stories was different - lol - I jot James Joyce, Stephen King, Mark Twain, and H.P. Lovecraft!

 

Cory Doctorow, Chuck Palahniuk, David Foster Wallace. It's funny, after I got my first result, I clicked on the link to his works on Amazon, and the other two authors immediately popped up as related searches. At least I'm consistent?

 

The only consistent thing with me, is that I always get sci-fi authors. Which is funny, since the very first short story I made was a sci-fi story.(Which will never get posted here because it fits better as a novel than as a short story.)

 

Nice! Post excerpt when you're done?

 

I got Arthur Clarke (yay!), L. Frank Baum (huh? never read him), and George Orwell (yay, but very weird, because the piece that resulted in Orwell is the most ornate, overwritten prose I've ever done).

This thing is worthless.

 

Baum wrote the Wizard of Oz.

 

How's this for weird - every piece I've written got a different writer - but the novel I'm working on - every one of it's drafts, including one that's majorly changed in style got the same author!

 

I'm well aware of that. I simply said I hadn't read him, not that I didn't know who he was. My comment (huh?) was there to indicate that I didn't see how Baum could have influenced me - he didn't, yet this infernal machine thinks I write like him. Or, at least in one story, I wrote like him.

I hope he was good!

 

Depending on which parts I put in I get James Joyce or Stephen King. James Joyce was who I got on the more emotive parts of my writing and Stephen King was who I got on the suspenseful parts.

 

Apparently, my second novel is written in a like Cory Doctorow's style...I don't even know who he is. lol *researches* tried an earlier part of my draft and I got Chuck Palahniuk...
My first novel is written like Stephen King's style...I've never read any of his stuff though so that's kinda weird.
Probably not accurate but fun to use anyway.

 

Cory Doctorow... But my husband gets Stephen King, which is somewhat worrying because our texts exist in the same novel... so there're two different styles there, huh? Always thought our styles are very similar.
Looks like there aren't many writer options in the engine.

 

I write like Dan Brown. Not sure that's an endearment.

 

Arthur C. Clarke! I'll take that

 

My bad, Minstrel, didn't mean to sound pedantic. I read him in grade school then discussed his writing wrt populism in high school. Can't remember much, but I know it didn't totally suck.

 

Thanks! It's good to know that, according to this machine that says I write like Baum, I don't totally suck!

'Cause you know, totally sucking would suck.

Does anybody know how this machine works? Maybe it doesn't do analysis at all; maybe it just pops out the name of some random famous writer.

 

I'm guessing it's an algorithm that averages length of word, length of sentence, etc in whatever you write and compares it to known authors' work. It seems to be pretty consistent for me, so I think it's not completely random, though my boyfriend wrote "I love poop." over and over again for about four paragraphs and the machine said that was very similar to Margaret Atwood's work.

 

James Joyce and Dan Brown here

 

Wow...

I'm a little ashamed of this, guys, but I just about cried. I saw the title of this thread before I saw the link, and I knew who I write like, so I was going to reply. Then I thought to myself, 'this thing couldn't know the style of every well-known author.'

So I grabbed three paragraphs from one of my projects and there it was:

You write like Douglas Adams.​

You have no idea how amazing it is to paste my writing into this thing and be told by someone other than myself that my writing is similar to my favorite author of all time.

Well, thank you OP, you just made my week.

~ J. J.

 

@JJ_Maxx,
You are fortunate then, I am still looking up Joyce James and Dan Brown on Google I know who they are, but now I am even more curious.

 

Jee.
Zuz.

This is not possible. But wait a minute - maybe this machine is cluing us in to something we'd never realized before. Maybe Dan Brown really writes like James Joyce. I'm reminded of that scene in The Birdcage where Robin Williams is trying to teach Nathan Lane to walk like a man. "Walk like John Wayne." Lane minces along for a few feet and says, "Not good?" Williams says, "Actually, it's perfect. I just never realized John Wayne walked like that."

 

I put in a few snippets. I got Arthur Clarke, Mary Shelley, and Dan Brown... Quite a spectrum!

 

@minstrel,
It's a machine after all I am trying not to take it seriously, but I have to admit -I am stoked. It's back to Google for me

 

Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace, and Dan Brown.