Several of my posts brought this comparison:
A few produced this result:
Doctorow is a blogger with, disappointingly, leftist leanings.
A couple yielded this:
I write like
Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
One of these:
And one of these:
I often re-read books, actually. That is the mark of writers I truly enjoy. Of all the authors named, only Orwell is one I re-read, and I try to read Animal Farm or 1984 roughly once a year. They were prescient the first time around, and just get fatter and fatter as the years pass. As writers go, I suppose Orwell's pretty good company, but he's certainly a small part of my reading list.
I took in a smattering of Poe(try) along the way, and there is actually a collection of Poe's work somewhere in my boxes of books. I read Doyle as a kid, of course, and Brown more recently. I wouldn't re-read Brown and haven't felt any inspiration to re-read Doyle, although I just might if the world would calm down a bit.
Many, probably the majority, yielded this:
Interestingly, Richard Mitchell's Underground Grammarian text a few posts down produced this same outcome, as did (with consistency) a few pieces penned by Jeff Cooper that I fed into the beastie. I've only heard the name - never read a thing Lovecraft wrote. It's intriguing that Mitchell, Cooper and I would test the same, since in both topic and style they rank among my favorite writers. This is getting interesting. So, I copied parts of letters I wrote 30 years ago, which consistently brought up Lovecraft's name as well.
That was long before any of Mitchell's works (and most of Cooper's, including all of his books) were published. If asked before today, I would have guessed that my own style might have been influenced by them. It now appears that just the opposite is true: Our style is our own, if we're genuine, and we're simply most attracted to the writers who think and express themselves the same way we do, regardless of the topic.
Makes sense!
Mitchell, Cooper, Fireplaceguy and now Lovecraft. That's another author I need to read, and he's now high on my used bookstore shopping list to infinity and beyond, at least until I satisfy my curiosity.
Running my words through this wringer was an interesting exercise. You never know what you'll find! Try it, a few times, for yourself, along with the words of a couple of your favorite authors...
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