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| This actually happens, kids. |
Just this in, everybody. No longer do you have to rely on your friends, your fans (if you are so blessed as to have them) or even your middle school language arts teacher to inform you what kind of famous author you write like. Thanks to extreme advances in technology since the Kindle, computers are now more than willing to tell you who you write like!
If you are a writer (or even the average blogger) and have been living beneath a rock, then you probably missed out on one of the latest memes to his the internet. “I Write Like” is a web-based program that analyzes inputted paragraphs and spits out white bread authors that it thinks you write like. Of course, being an author, I totally had to do this.
For control purposes, I’m going to completely redo these and ignore any answers I may have from before. That said, let’s see who I write like.
First up is an excerpt from Nagnomei: The Key of Nixey.
“This is beyond inhuman.” The usually haughty and well-groomed moon goddess now roamed the empty streets with her companions, her hair disheveled and robes tarnished by soot. “This is Serafin.”Three other wayward figures bumbled their way through debris behind her. Gylara climbed over a piece of fallen house before asking, “Are you sure?”Alillia lowered her hand after another flush of smoke flew by. “Of course I am. He did the same thing to one of my villages five years ago. It ended up looking exactly like this.”The others recombined in the middle of the dusty highway, their spirits shaking as their immortal bodies breathed in murky, sulfuric air and trudged through broken boards, cracked glass, and a trail of carnage that made war look like a viable excuse. Shiloh stepped away from the corpse of a white, bloody chicken before the heel of his boot could accidentally stomp on it.“We should clean this mess up before some mortal finds it,” Gylara then mumbled. “Give me a few minutes and I’ll have the bodies gone.”“Do you think you should get rid of all of them?” Fate bemused, strolling past the crumbled marketplace and the severed hand that lied outside its old doorstep. She was the only one who seemed detached from the atrocity that befell the nameless Rawlian village – her visions of its occurrence from the past few nights made her feel like she was walking through a predisposed nightmare for the hundredth time.“Why wouldn’t we? Do you want somebody discovering this?”Fate shrugged her thin shoulders and turned away from her three companions. “He’ll be back soon.”
WHRRRRR goes the internetz, and now for my result! Survey says:
Naturally I have no idea who the heck Mario Puzo is. Wikipedia informs me, however, that he wrote the likes of The Godfather and the Superman screenplays. Well, dang. That’s kinda cool. He also wrote a lot of mafia related stories. Oh. Oh okay. That’s totally like high fantasy with Gods and swords, right?
Moving on to exhibit two, an excerpt from CROSS//Rebirth
Danielle sighed and approached the door to the office. She knocked once, expecting the familiar grunt alerting her to enter. But she never heard it, nor did she hear much of anything. Not being one to just intrude on her commanding officer’s abode, Danielle waited another minute before knocking again. This time she thought she heard some sort of affirmation coming from the other side, so she grabbed the handle and swung the door open as if she were bestowed with every god-given right to do so.Behind said door was an image that would forever be burned into Danielle’s poor and badly scathed mind: prostrate on the desk was her esteemed captain, her brown uniform horribly tussled from repeated pawing and cheeks redder than a freshly picked cherry. Between her legs stood the major, kneeling over the edge of the desk with her short, dark hair concealing her eyes but not hiding the acute smirk on her face. Under any other circumstance Danielle would have bailed from the room, leaving the captain to her usual lesbian debauchery in her own office, but she was so frozen solid that Danielle was not sure if she could pry her eyes away. Once she analyzed the state they were in and the fact that both women were high-ranking officials in her country’s government, Danielle wanted to scream at them, “God damnit, you whores, this is not a pornocracy!”
Wait for it….
David Foster Wallace
Oh, hey, somebody else I’ve never heard of! Google magic says his most popular book is called Infinite Jest, and further investigation leads me to believe that this is a novel I should read sometime in the future. I’ll take it.
Of course the next natural question to ask is, “So, what is this program doing to make it say I write like Wallace??” Having traipsed the like of programming and internet crap over the past few, formidable years of my life, I’m lead to believe that it’s a simple algorithm based on sentence structures, word choice, and punctuation. To see if I was right, I actually looked up how it looks, and hey, the creator talks about it right on the site! To save you even more scrolling, I will merely point you to a link to the page:
http://blog.iwl.me/post/829211834/how-i-write-like-works
Aw, I was more or less right! This makes me feel a little better. And goes to prove that technology isn’t quite intelligent enough to compare my works. That makes me feel a lot better. I don’t know if I could handle the onus of writing The Godfather Part IV.
PS: For funsies, I ran my senior thesis through that. Not giving you an excerpt, but here is the result:
Oh dear. Is that what I wrote about?? No wonder I got an A!!