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.