Reading My Writes

Good evening.

There’s a website out there in Internet-Land called ‘I Write Like’, and, if I may make so bold, I would like you to visit it: http://iwl.me/.
If you feel so inclined, cut and paste the last email you wrote (let’s say), and come back here with the results. I’m sure we’d all be very entertained if you were to paste them into the comments below (be warned, the link is VERY small - damn you, Typepad).

Then I’ll show you mine. (NB Nothing will self-destruct if you don’t do this. This isn’t Mission Impossible. Just thought it would be fun.)

All done?

Ok. So apparently I write like (in no particular order):
Joyce, Christie (Agatha, not Linford), King (Stephen, not Billie Jean), Fleming, Nabokov, Twain, Carroll and Shakespeare.

Which is all very well, except those are the results from a children’s book I’m writing.

I’ve come to an unpleasant conclusion: it’s entirely possible that my use of language is a little too sophisticated for the age group at which I’m aiming (although I am encouraged by Joyce and Carroll in a weird kind of way).

The real killer, though, came when I entered the last two chapters. I wrote them in a hurry, desperate to tie up loose plot ends, and haven’t edited them.

In short, they are, frankly, pants.

In fact, if you’ve got a moment, they are the biggest load of unfeasible bollocks written by anyone since someone thought to themselves “I know, I’ll put an albino monk in there - that’ll be realistic”.

I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that, on the basis of those two half-baked, feeble, raggedy-assed, insultingly dimwitted, semi-literate, downright unpublishable, please-for-pity’s-sake-and-for-the-good-of-humankind-never-write-anything-again, miserable apologies for chapters, I write like...

Dan Brown.

I am sure you will draw your own conclusions.

I, meanwhile, am going into the garden to eat worms.

Comments

[The Butler]

Albino Monk!!!! What happens next... ????? Already too much suspense for a Children's novel i fear.

[Charles Wroth]

I W L: Stephen King. Is that good? I think I'll take it!

[Lev Parikian]

It is, of course, to be noted that they say write like, not as well as...
I was nonetheless mildly chuffed that two of my cricketing short stories got the highest acclaim possible you write like P.G.Wodehouse.
May well print and frame.

Lev

[Finn Ros]

Oscar Wilde apparently! Haha, not sure about that...

[A-M]

Only just got around to this - J D Salinger, very funny!

[Jane Angell]

I Write Like... H P Lovecraft - of whom, in my ignorance, I had not heard. He is "probably best known as a writer of weird fiction" according to the know-it-all-net. Considering the paragraph I input was the concluding one of a paper I am giving soon at an academic conference, this is interesting...

Enjoyable post, as ever Lev, thank you.