Just found a website called I Write Like. You paste in a sample of your writing, and the algorithm does its voodoo and determines which famous author your work most resembles. How accurate it is, I don’t know. But I gave it a whirl, and here are my results.
I cut-n-pasted the first six or seven paragraphs of my latest revised and re-edited short story. Bing! It came back:
Not sure who Cory Doctorow is. A quick wikipedia search tells me he’s a science fiction writer specializing in cyberpunk. Okay, that’s good. Not a big fan of cyberpunk, but the sample I had them test had references to futuristic computer thingamabobs.
Next, I did a half-dozen paragraphs of the second-to-latest repackaged short story. Ah! Now we’re getting somewhere:
I assume it’s referencing Arthur C. Clarke. Personally, I have mixed feelings about him. I’ve written about them a bunch elsewhere on this blog. Quickly, I absolutely loved the Rama stuff, but not much else. However, anyone or anything comparing me to Mr. Clarke is something I have no qualms about.
Just to make certain, I submitted the first couple of paragraphs of the first chapter of my novel The Whale of Cortary. And sure enough:
Hmmm. That chapter was basically all action and no exposition. Finally, I tested chapter 4, which is all galaxy-far-far-away exposition. Hey – whaddya know?
Not sure how to seriously take all this. I suppose I could type in a few paragraphs from Arthur C. Clarke’s Reach for Tomorrow, on the bookshelf behind me, and see what results this website will spit out.
But that would ruin the illusion, if I may be so bold as to reference Arthur Clarke’s third law.
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