Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Okay, I've been entering things just to amuse myself (and to procrastinate) and I've gotten an array of answers, most of which seemed pretty random. I just entered a Twilight fan-fiction piece I wrote last year (don't scoff, I did it as a birthday gift for a Twilight obsessed friend for the purpose of filling in the, uhhh, somewhat sparse details that were left out of the "sex scene" in book four)---anyway, I plugged it into the site and low and behold---it said I write like Stephanie Meyer! And it didn't say that with any of the other pieces entered. Color me surprised!

This can be WAAAAAAYYY too dangerous!

The first chapter of my completed novel: Ray Bradbury

The first chapter of my WIP: Neil Gaiman

I don't know what to say, since I'm not a terribly huge fan of either...but I do write fantasy, and since Neil Gaiman is a huge name (I do love the movie Stardust, just not the book) I guess that's good, right?

Now I'm wondering what other things I can put in there. I do have one trunked novel, and I'd love to see what it says but I'm terrified it'll say "You Write Like Unpublishable Crap!"

This is hilarious!! One of my WIP's came out like Stephen King, the other like David Foster Wallace. I think my first one came out like King because it had several expletives. hahahaha.

I'm amused (and a bit confused) to see that I am the first to have this thing tell me I write like Edgar Allan Poe.
Not only this, but nearly everything I pasted into it came out as such.

Hilariously, the three other outcomes I got were Dan Brown for an action scene, Oscar Wilde in a more recent piece, and Stephanie Meyer in a scene rife with adjective and adverb abuse.


I'm interested in all the Poe results, since none of the scenes I pasted in were particularly macabre or Poe-like.

Apparently, I write like Jack London. At least in english, of course. I don't think the gadget supports spanish :-)

Ironically, I've never read any Jack London. Maybe it's time I start.

Nathan, can we now look forward to JACOB WONDERBAR WANDERS AROUND DUBLIN FOR A DAY?

I put in 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.' repeated dozens of times, and 'I Write Like' said I write like P. G. Wodehouse! Not Jack Torrance or Stephen King? Maybe Wodehouse's ghost haunts the Overlook Hotel.

I put in the first few chapters of my fantasy novel and it said I write like Charles Dickens.

I blog like David Foster Wallace, pretty consistently (with one foray into Kurt Vonnegut territory).

I put in a picture book, which came out as J K Rowling. And the chase scene I wrote for Nathan's contest a while back came out as Stephen King.

My husband pointed out that obviously, everything that I write for publication in book form will be a blockbuster that gets made into a wildly popular movie. :-)

If only!

I've been looking at that subject line and I keep thinking it should be "Who do you write like?" My reasoning is that to determine the case of an interrogative pronoun, you turn the question into a statement and change "who|whom" to "he|him":
"You write like him" doesn't sound right because there's actually an implied predicate, which would have been in parentheses in a sentence diagram. You're actually saying "You write like he writes." So the correct form would be "Who do you write like?"
If I'm right, there's probably little hope that we'll still be using "who" at all a century from now as "whom" will have replaced it as the nominative, similar to when "you" replaced "ye" some time ago.
Am I correct, completely wrong or are both forms acceptable?

Mostly I got David Foster Wallace and Dan Brown, but a few glowing times I got J.K Rowling and Shakespeare

Wish I knew how they calculate that.

daydreamin wrote:Wish I knew how they calculate that.

I was curious about this too. My result said Ursula K. Le Guin, but I'd never read anything of hers so I had no idea what that meant.

I ended up checking out her novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, and found a concrete similarity in our writing. She and I both love the hyphenated word. Within two pages of her novel I found: storm-beaten, rain-beaten, fountain-jets, and soft-running. I do this A LOT, and so I think that is the basis for the site's comparison in my case.

I plugged in sections from six different parts of my manuscript. Here's what I got (In order): Stephanie Meyer, Ray Bradbury, J.R.R. Tolkien, Cory Doctorow (twice) , Chuck Palahniuk,

Now, when an agent asks for a writer to compare themselves to established writer's in their query letters, I can copy and paste this list, right? Although, since I got Doctorow twice (both time for sections from the perspective of the same character), I think I should pick up a book by him.

Okay, I just put in a completely separate story and got Doctorow for a third time. Now I really must investigate immediately! Good thing I work at a bookstore.

This site is dangerously addictive. I really should be working on my best selling novel right now. And yet, I'm going to find something else to plug into the machine.

This is addictive! I just plugged in two separate, random parts from my WIP and got Chuck Palahnuick and Isaac Asimov. Guess my next novel should be about scientists fighting each other.

I put in the tentative prelude to my WiP and got Stephen King.