… or so it would seem. based on the first 11,658 words of my first novel – Oxygen Toxicity. Of course, the first question to ask is – “Is this all a scam?” After all, this site is seeking to sell goods, services, etc. to writers and being told you write like someone you’ve never heard of is no way to stroke an ego or make a sale.

Time to do an experiment or three.

First, let’s start with “Tiger, Tiger” and action adventure staring a 17-ish female dive guide and some sharks. According to this text, I write like …

… which is interesting because a friend who read “Oxygen Toxicity” recently told me that I do. How odd. Lets try “Solitude” – pure science fiction and again, completely different in tone and style.

Okay, this is getting weird. First, a reader did comment that this story reminded him of “Songs of Distant Earth” by Arthur C. Clarke. I can see the resemblance and in fact was mindful of the overlap in both content and tone as I wrote it. Furthermore, I think of “Oxygen Toxicity’ as 25% Arthur C. Clarke and 75% Tom Clancy (back when he was an author, not a brand). In fact, Clarke Station (one of the major venues in “Oxygen Toxicity”) is an hommage to Sir Arthur just as Port Sheffield is an hommage to Charles Sheffield – the other author who published a space elevator novel in 1979.

One more sample – “Instant Replay” – an early story – and my most successful to date having take 1st place out of a small field in a short story contest.

Hmmm? Four samples – four famous authors. What’s going on? The possibilities include:

1. It’s all just random – I put in anything and I get back a random motivational comparison.
2. They actually are doing meaningful analysis, but my style varies with each work.
3. They are doing analysis, but the results say more about their reference samples of each author that they do about my style.
4. Style is highly variable in my work and in the work of Shakespeare, King, Clarke, and Brown. On the one hand, this seems unlikely because we all have the experience of noticing when some prose “reads like” a familiar author. More likely is that our brains are extraordinarily good at detecting correlations that their computer algorithm might miss.

How can we test this? The key to good science is experimental reproducibility and prediction.

So, let’s test possibility #1 by feeding the same sample back into their system in a different order and from a different computer (eliminating the possibility that the website might store an association between (the hash of) a sample and a result in a cookie. This doesn’t eliminate the possibility that they could maintain this association on their server but that’s harder to test for. The results are:

1. Instant Replay - still Dan Brown
2. Oxygen Toxicity - still William Shakespeare – Note that I used a slightly different version which would be enough to defeat a purely mathematical hash but not enough to defeat a more sophisticated signature such as a set of paragraph hashes or a word frequency analysis.
3. Solitude - still Arthur C. Clarke
4. Tiger, Tiger - still Stephen King – Again, a slightly different version with what little profanity there was in the original stripped out for submission to a youth oriented market place (“Those gosh-darn Tiger sharks!’) – Okay, not a direct quote but you get the point.

So, my results matched – 4 for 4.

Next, I analyzed 4,500 words from 7/8ths of the way through “Oxygen Toxicity.” According to this analysis, I write like Arthur C. Clarke. This should not come as a surprise because I wrote this novel front to back and I’m sure my style changed over time. In fact, my writing because more spare with time and one of my major hurdles was to go back and excise (or as Stephen King has said – “Kill your babies!”) two thirds out of the first third  of an early 140,000 word draft to get down to a more publishable length. Although most of this was stripping out unnecessary material on a wholesale basis, you can’t tell me that this did not impact the style.

For now, I’ll take some pride and comfort out of “I started like Shakespeare and ended up like Clarke.”

At this point, we know that style is variable (options 2 or 4) and/or reference samples matter (option 3). Although these variable are harder to tease apart, a couple experimental approaches seems potentially fruitful. Does Clarke write like Clarke? Does Brown write like Brown? Does X write like X? (where X is a writer that is a) famous, and b) has available writing samples on-line.

1. “The Sentinel” by Arther C. Clarke seems to have been written in the style of Arther C. Clarke – a match.
2. The first few pages of “The Lost Symbol” by Dan Brown seems to have been writtten by Dan Brown – two for two.
3. Chapter I of “Umney’s Last Case” by Stephen King seems to have been written by William Gibson – BZZZZ! – two for three.
4. Chapter VI of “Umney’s Last Case” seems to heve been written by Kurt Vonnegut – two for four.
5. Chapter V of “Umney’s Last Case” also seems to heve been written by Kurt Vonnegut – two for five.
6. Chapter VI of “Umney’s Last Case” seems to have been written by William Gibson – two for six – which opens the possibility that Steve is toying with us.
7. Chapter III of “Umney’s Last Case” seems to have been written by Raymond Chandler – two for seven. According to Wikipedia, “Umley’s Last Case” was deliberately written in a very Chandler-esque style. Is it possible that King, Gibson, Chandler, and Vonnegut are close enough in style to match each other. Seems unlikely since I’ve always felt that you have to be a) schizophrenic, or b) seriously tripping to even think like Vonnegut, much less write like him. What is certain is that “Umley’s Last Case is seriously messing up my experiment. Moving on.
8. Act 3, Scene 1 of Hamlet seems to have been written by William Shakespeare – three for seven.
9. Chapter 17 of “Agent to the Stars” by John Scalzi seems to have been written by Cory Doctorow – three for eight. Is John Scalzi too new to be recognized? BTW this novel, while early, a bit rough, and more than a bit quirky is excellent. I was introduced to John Scalzi by “Old Man’s War” – his brilliant breakout novel and a personal favorite written in a Heinlein-esque style.
10. And finally, John Scalzi’s “That Was The Millennium That Was” seems to be written in the style of Dan Brown – which, frankly, I do not see at all. Dan Brown writes a decent thriller (I’m more fond of his non-religious symbolism books than his more famous and certainly more lucrative works)  while TWTMTW is just ROFL funny. Scalzi’s dissection of 8-track tape as “The Best Dead-End Technology of the Millennium” had me wheezing and in tears for minutes.

One final experiment and this time I mean it. I googled “Ranting Lunatics” and found the Lunatic Fundamentalist Zealot Rant of the Month Awards. I then cut and pasted the “winning” rants into the I Write Like website. It would appear that, in aggregate, ranting religious fundamentalists write in the style of Dan Brown.

Judging from the reception the “The Di Vinci Code” received in some quarters, this should piss off religious zealots almost as much as it might embarrass Mr. Brown. Perhaps when you write “God” a lot, you get sorted into the same category making the I Write Like website no judge of a writer’s soul or talent. If it’s any comfort, both sides can cling the the belief that it’s all about word choice.

There is another possibility, based on Dan Brown’s frequent appearance in these analyses. I’m from Colorado and I’ve been told that Coloradoans speak the least accented American English of any region of the country. We don’t drawl, we don’t twang, and outside of pronouncing “washing” as “wersing” and using the word “tad” a tad too much, this seems true to my untrained ears. Perhaps Dan Brown writes in the most normalized, stylized, form of the English language, thus placing him near the epicenter of the modern literary world. Go Daniel!

The bottom line … I’m not sure that this kind of analysis means much of anything.