Who do you write like?

Are your characters as snazzy as James Bond? Are your sentences lyrical as those in "Lolita"? Pop a few paragraphs into the website I Write Like to find out if you write like Ian Fleming or Vladimir Nabokov. You might find your prose is as eerie as Edgar Allan Poe's or witty as Oscar Wilde's.

Beware: If you enter a blog post, you may just discover that you write like Dan Brown. I know. It happened to me.

So I tried an article, and discovered that I also write like Stephen King. Not bad! His books may not be as sophisticated as other authors found in the database -- James Joyce, Haruki Murakami -- but I like reading Stephen King, which I can't say for Dan Brown. What's more, Margaret Atwood put in her prose and discovered that she writes like Stephen King -- which means that I'm in pretty good company.

Other possible results: Isaac Asimov, Raymond Chandler, Lewis Carroll, Chuck Palahniuk, Bram Stoker, H.P. Lovecraft, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens. Reviewing the tweets about the site, the results have been heavy on the male authors. In fact, only two female authors have come up that I've seen -- J.K. Rowling and Jane Austen. Does that mean that all of us write like iconic guys, or that there aren't many female writers whose work is in the system that's doing the comparing?

The inner workings of I Write Like are invisible to the user, so it's impossible to know for sure whether the thing that makes you write like Charles Dickens are long, long, comma-connected sentences or use of 19th-century vocabulary. Check it out, and thanks for reading this Dan Brown-style post.

-- Carolyn Kellogg
twitter.com/paperhaus

Photo: Stephen King in Los Angeles in 2004. Credit: Mark Mainz / Getty Images

Comments

[Levi Stahl]

From one sample this afternoon, I was labeled as writing like Nabokov, which was flattering. Two others caused me to be pegged as Lovecraft, which, while flattering in a different way, did force me to acknowledge more openly than usual my tendency toward the baroque, if not the flat-out archaic, in constructing sentences.

[Milo James Fowler]

I came up as Margaret Atwood twice and Daniel Defoe once. I've since added two of Ms. Atwood's novels to my reading list.

[Lucy Olson]

I put in some Nabokov (from Signs and Symbols) and it came back as Margaret Atwood, so she's in GREAT company.

[David Abrams]

I fed the first 1,300 words of my novel (a dark comedy about the Iraq War) into this analysis machine. Result: H.P. Lovecraft. I doubt Cthulhu ever toted an M-16. Undaunted, I plugged in two other samples of my writing--something Hemingwayesque (they said I wrote like Stephen King) and something sentimental about an angsty teenage boy (they said I wrote like Chuck Palahniuk). I give up.

[Jane Barnes]

William Shakespeare writes like James Joyce, except for Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" speech, which is apparently like Mark Twain. I think I'm done playing with I Write Like! :-)

[Joanne]

I write like Kurt Vonnegut for my English papers (awesome), Dan Brown for my business memos (interesting... memos are supposed to be short and concise), and David Foster Wallace, Margaret Atwood, and Ursula K. Le Guin for my blog entries (nice). Huh.

[D. Cloyce Smith]

I entered twenty different passages from my journal (which records my thoughts on books I've read) and got 13 different answers: Vladimir Nabokov, Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown, Stephen King, James Joyce, H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, David Foster Wallace, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur C. Clarke, Mark Twain, Margaret Mitchell (!), Douglas Adams.

Only one of the passages was about a book by one of these thirteen authors; my thoughts on Nabokov were apparently written by Arthur C. Clarke. In one instance, simply deleting a sentence changed me from David Foster Wallace to H. P. Lovecraft, which would have undoubtedly surprised both of them.

In short, the "textual analysis" used for this fun little gimmick is bogus.

[Sean]

I write like Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight for my business portfolio.

[whatever]

actually you write like H. P. Lovecraft...