I Write Like Who I Like I Hope
Yesterday I had a run-in with I Write Like, a site which purports to analyze any text and give you the name of a famous author with a similar style. I gave it a spin yesterday and received P.G. Wodehouse, H.P. Lovecraft and Bram Stoker for a trio of Moral Guide entries. My brother fed it some technical data and received Stephen King.
I fooled around with copying and pasting in text until I had an idea of what authors were in the system, and then wrote some text snippets in an attempt to get specific authors.
First up was this to try for Raymond Chandler:
So I walked down to the bar and slapped a fiver on the counter. It stuck there, soaking up some stale beer and the flecks of dreams that had spilled from glasses and mouths.
“What do you want me to do with that?” asked the bartender. He’d seen too many deaths in this bar to count, what was one more out back in the alley?
“I want you to insulate your wallet. The winter’s coming, it’ll be cold.”
The bartender slipped it into a creaky old register with a big, fat bullet hole right over the L in Melner Machines.
“I don’t know his name. I know his drink. A dram of gin and an olive, taken in one go, fifteen minutes later, and every fifteen minutes, another, until he staggers into the street and out of my mind.”
“A ginhound wrecked up that broad? Tell me you don’t have jazz in this joint.”
“I ain’t got a reason to lie to you.”
“Maybe not to me, but maybe to my client.”
The analyzer returned Raymond Chandler. Success!
Second, I wanted to get James Joyce. Which was difficult because I’ve never knowingly read any James Joyce.
the men fell like trees in the yawning vistas of british columbia toppling one by one as their hats fell like drifts of snow from the crowns of the boughs in cold december. the bullets kicked up little clouds of dust, the fog of chainsaws around the feet of the trees, roaring away against the life that each killed.
if a man falls in a field, and nobody cares, does he make any news?
I write like: James Joyce! Two for two! Next, I wrote some stream-of-consciousness as a random test.
Jimmy broke down the door and snarled.
“You stay away from my butter! That’s my butter! You ain’t got a right to it!”
Timmy whirled, knife halfway to his steaming toast.
“It’s my butter as much as it is yours!”
“You use your cream cheese! You bought those bagels and you’re gonna eat them!”
“Keep the fucking bagels!” Timmy said, buttering his toast. He buttered it hard, pressing to the point of no return against the bread. It collapsed as the butter soaked into the nooks and crannies and softened the bread. He almost poked holes through but kept a steady, angry hand.
Jimmy pissed in Timmy’s pillowcase while he ate butter.
Behold, Chuck Palahniuk. Not bad. Now I would attempt to get Stephen King. This took the longest. Passage after passage failed, until I tried a butchered, abridged version of Stephen King’s IT:
And then this fucking clown turned into a ghost and haunted these kids until some kind of space lobster appeared and killed that one guy in the bathtub.
Clowns and [Maine] lobsters, two mainstays of King, carried me through! I wanted to see if I could mad-libs the passage and get another author:
This goat turned into a lion and haunted these kids until some kind of electrical appliance appeared and made toast for that one guy in the bathtub.
Still King.
At that point Michael, the friend who showed me the site in the first place, copied in Mark Twain’s [James] Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses and was told that Mark Twain wrote like James Fenimore Cooper. Maybe this slight will re-animate Mark Twain’s corpse. I was surprised that it failed with a known text and also that it had James Fenimore Cooper as an option. Then Michael pasted in the first few paragraphs of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and received Twain.
In conclusion, I Write Like is a fun site to play with until Twain’s zombie tracks down the server rack and chews the cords to pieces.
