I started the morning playing with one of those quirky websites that take some aspect of you and tell you what famous person you are most like within some specific subset of famous people. No, I didn’t pick a movie heroine, or even a Jane Austen heroine. Instead this was “I Write Like.”
I tried it twice. The fist time I entered some text from one of my blogs and the result came back:
David Foster Wallace
I Write Likeby Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
I was intrigued, so I decided to try some text from one of my two recent manuscripts — both Young Adult fantasy novels. Here’s the result I got the second time:
I write like
Ursula K. Le GuinI Write Likeby Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
It was fun, but I decided I should stop at two and continue with the real work at hand, which meant doing the job I am paid to do each day. Still, it was a fun way to start a Thursday.
Now that the day is done, I decided to try again. This time I selected the synopsis for the second fantasy book, and came up with:
I write like
William GibsonI Write Likeby Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
I began to wonder if the site is analyzing based on storyline rather than actual writing style, so I tried the synopsis for the first book (the one characterized earlier as being like Ursula K LeGuin. The result came back that my synopsis was like — you guessed it:
I write like
David Foster WallaceI Write Likeby Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
At which point I gave up lest I just end up giving myself a headache. Clearly my synopsis reads like a synopsis and my fiction like fiction, and if I did one more of these I was going to make myself crazy!
Still, it was fun. Try it once, or maybe twice. I think four times was ill-advised.
Try it out if you have some time.
Kathryn
