I found another internet time-wasting activity, courtesy of my local newspaper today.  Under the head “Who do you write like?” the AP article describes a new website started by a Russian software developer based in Montenegro, who developed a program along the lines of a spam filter that matches words, sentence length (but not much more) to a database of 50 authors (thus far).

So I took a what I thought was a well-written political commentary from a few years back that I had on my hard drive—and up came H.P. Lovecfraft: “science fiction, weird fiction.”  WTF, I thought.  So I frantically pasted in some recent pithy commentary on another subject and up came Cory Doctorow.  Who?  Some Canadian trotskyist “science fiction” writer.  WTFx100!  Now truly desperate, I pasted in a snarky, literary (I thought) riposte to someone’s comment to me on another forum—and up came Vladimir Nabokov.  Urrah!  Gonna quit while I’m ahead (not that I have any remotest illusion that i can write like Nabokov).

But that didn’t stop me from testing this program further, using a most convenient source of writing styles—LOL—altho it takes some effort to identify meaningful passages of original writing amongst all the clip’n'paste and one-liners….

And the No. 1 author represented here in style, based on a totally unscientific random sampling of the more prolific recent posters—Kurt Vonnegut.  Who writes like Kurt?  Ambersun (2 big chunks of prose sampled), Mr. LL (no surprise there), Courlander (ditto), and—no, it cannot be—Peteris Cedrins (2 chunks, to make sure).  But then, perhaps it is a case of responding point-by-point to A, causing the style to seem mimicked.  Sure enough, a long essay from his blog yields—H.P. Lovecraft.

Wahabist, it seems, also writes like my trotskyist double Cory Doctorow.  Except when he gets his juices flowing.  Then David Foster Wallace takes over (Obama’s Oval Office speech in June was total DFW, according to the website.

Just for fun, I ran Jandzs thru the mill—James Joyce.  No surprise there for anyone who ever tried to get thru Finnegan’s Wake in college.  Andrejs—Charles Dickens.  Still mulling that one over.

Irena—Dan Brown (also Talivaldis), with an occasional foray into that H.P. Lovecraft guy again.

But the biggest shocker (to me at least) is Varonis/Roberts.  The guy writes like Jane Austen.  Really?

Here’s the site: http://iwl.me/

ak

I got the Cory D for me as well - anyone heard of this writer?

Irena was H.P. Lovecraft?  Heh, only if Mr LL has grown tentacles from his nose…

I just ran my own post above thru the site—I’m H.P. Lovecraft.  Damn, I can’t stand this.  Have to get snarky/literary again to regain my inner Nabokov.  And you, Anita, need to write longer stuff so I can run you thru as well.

ar labu nakti!

ak

Couldn’t sleep.  Ran above post thru site.  I’m back to being Nabokov!  Really gotta stop this.

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

/P

What the dickens. I was hoping for twain.

Forgive me if I raise cynical brow. Ran a a few of my blog posts through. Got DFW 3 times, a Joyce, a Vonegutt, a Doctorow, and an Arthur C. Clarke. For good measure ran some of my feeble attempts at fiction stored safely from the view of the world on my hard drive and got a Chuck Palahniuk, a Margaret Atwood and an Anne Rice.
Seems I am all over the place, but some might have already suspected.

Andrejs

Gotta love this and I do!!!  AK writes, “…altho it takes some effort to identify “meaningful” (my own quotes here, for emphasis) passages of original writing…” to describe the writers of LOL, heh, heh!!!  Well, after writing a few lines, myself, I also came up with H.P. Lovecraft and that same Trotskyite no one seems to have heard of, Cory Doctorow to describe my own personal style of writing.  Darn if I just don’t cut it—I do aspire to be more like Kurt Vonnegut; I’ll just have to keep playing around with this some more, keep trying, but all hope is far from lost—you can always go to the yellow box in the top right hand corner and subscribe to a newsletter on how to become a better writer and—it’s even free!

PS In all seriousness, though, I think there are some amazingly good writers here on this forum and that, plus the Latvian connection, is what I think keeps me coming back!

Irena