Riordan's Desk

I Write Like ...

A site sponsored by Coding Robots and Mémoires, (journaling software for Mac) offers a statistical analysis tool that analyzes the word choice and writing style from a sample you provide to suggest a famous writer whose style is closest to your own.

My initial submission consisted of the text from the first chapter of my latest novel The Big Wake-Up. To be honest, I was hoping the tool would say that I wrote like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett since I was certainly trying to write like them. Nope. Here's the result from the Magic 8-Ball:

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I decided to give it another sample where I was absolutely, positively--no holds barred--attempting to precisely mimic the style of another writer:

I write like
Arthur Conan Doyle

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Better. The sample in question was my Sherlock Holmes pastiche, "The Adventure of the Black Bishop," which was recently published in the chess fiction anthology Masters of Technique.

Finally, I couldn't resist submitting the text of the first chapter of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. Is there any excerpt of his writing that could be more quintessentially Chandler? Check it out:

I write like
Vladimir Nabokov

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Oops. Apparently not!

Update:

I couldn't resist trying it one more time with a selection from my novel Vulture Capital. As I describe here, Vulture is modeled after Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key, including the use of the (now less common) "objective" third person POV. If anything I've written should come up Hammett-like, this would be it.

Check out the results:

I write like
J. K. Rowling

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

No sale!

posted by Mark Coggins @ 8:09 PM