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Post by Suzy on Mar 30, 2014 15:18:26 GMT -5
I entered the first few paragraphs of the DaVinci Code and they said he wrote like Dan Brown; LOL Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S2 using Tapatalk 4 Another Dan Brown! |
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Post by Becca Mills on Mar 30, 2014 15:55:34 GMT -5
I entered the first few paragraphs of the DaVinci Code and they said he wrote like Dan Brown; LOL Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S2 using Tapatalk 4 Wow, really? Hm ... maybe there's something to this thing. |
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Post by vrabinec on Mar 31, 2014 10:12:46 GMT -5
So I put in all the chapters of my WIP and got the following:
13 chapters- Arthur C. Clarke (most of these dealt heavily with sci-fi space stuff)
11 chapter - James Joyce (these only started popping up after my MC's love interest was introduced, and the chapters deal heavily with romantic themes)
4 chapters - William Gibson (these appeared when the chapter dealt with futuristic technology. Gibson wrote the book that led to The Matrix)
4 chapters - J.K. Rowling (these chapters were set in places where the ruling class resided, kinda had the feel of a monarchy)
4 chapters - David Foster Wallace (these chapters show my MC in a confused state, kinda makes sense based on his writing)
3 chapters - Harry Harrison (these were kinda creepy sci-fi chapters. Harrison wrote the book that Soylent Green was based on)
3 chapters - Douglas Adams (these were more humorous chapters (I hope). Adams wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
3 chapter - Chuck Palahniuk (these are some chapters that are fairly violent. He wrote Fight Club)
2 chapters - Stephanie Meyer (these deal with a weird and very strong female character)
2 chapters - Cory Doctorow (these are chapters that are heavily political. He was a political writer)
2 chapters - Anne Rice
2 chapters - Margaret Mitchell
1 chapter - Mario Puzo (this chapter is a bloody interrogation. Puzo, of course, wrote The Godfather)
1 chapter - Rudyard Kipling
1 chapter - J.D. Salinger
1 chapter - P.G. Wodehouse
1 chapter - Oscar Wilde
1 chapter - Shakespeare
So, I'd say content has a lot to do with which writer it ascribes. I'm thinking it probably picks a writer in a similar genre, similar themes, similar cadence? Definitely not consistent across the board. Of course, I may be tailoring my narrative voice to the content of the chapter.
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Post by Suzy on Mar 31, 2014 11:43:30 GMT -5
Gee, Fred, you're a pot-purri kind of writer  Or it could mean that your novel is very multi-faceted |
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Post by vrabinec on Mar 31, 2014 11:52:00 GMT -5
Or the site's a farce.  I've read Clarke and Joyce. I would never mistake one for the other. Clarke is dry. Joyce is rich. I find it hard to believe I'm switching between such polar opposites. I think it's based more on content than style. Something's triggering which author to choose besides actual style, methinks. |
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Post by Suzy on Mar 31, 2014 11:57:09 GMT -5
Or the site's a farce. I've read Clarke and Joyce. I would never mistake one for the other. Clarke is dry. Joyce is rich. I find it hard to believe I'm switching between such polar opposites. I think it's based more on content than style. Something's triggering which author to choose besides actual style, methinks. Or it could be stuff like: lots of dialogue, must be x. Long narrative, just like y. And so on. I think it's a farce too. |
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Post by Daniel on Mar 31, 2014 13:12:08 GMT -5
I put in several more of my scenes and got wildly different results too. The first one came back as Dan Brown, but after that, it was Ursula K. Le Guin, Ian Fleming, Leo Tolstoy, Arthur Clark, and Vladimir Nabokov. I gave up in disgust at that point.
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Post by Suzy on Mar 31, 2014 13:44:59 GMT -5
I put in several more of my scenes and got wildly different results too. The first one came back as Dan Brown, but after that, it was Ursula K. Le Guin, Ian Fleming, Leo Tolstoy, Arthur Clark, and Vladimir Nabokov. I gave up in disgust at that point. What did you expect? I mean... post a piece of your writing and within seconds you're told you write like a famous author? Wouldn't it take a lot longer to analyze a text? |
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Post by vrabinec on Mar 31, 2014 13:59:33 GMT -5
I put in several more of my scenes and got wildly different results too. The first one came back as Dan Brown, but after that, it was Ursula K. Le Guin, Ian Fleming, Leo Tolstoy, Arthur Clark, and Vladimir Nabokov. I gave up in disgust at that point. What did you expect? I mean... post a piece of your writing and within seconds you're told you write like a famous author? Wouldn't it take a lot longer to analyze a text? I expected mine to say, "Writes like Paris Hilton!" Hey, she's a famous author. |
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Post by Suzy on Mar 31, 2014 14:05:35 GMT -5
What did you expect? I mean... post a piece of your writing and within seconds you're told you write like a famous author? Wouldn't it take a lot longer to analyze a text? I expected mine to say, "Writes like Paris Hilton!" Hey, she's a famous author. Famous, yes but not an author. Her dog writes for her. |
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Post by Suzy on Mar 31, 2014 14:09:54 GMT -5
Just like me. My lapdog laptop writes everything for me.
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Post by Becca Mills on Mar 31, 2014 14:23:38 GMT -5
Maybe it's based largely on vocabulary.
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Post by vrabinec on Mar 31, 2014 14:43:51 GMT -5
Hmm, some of those writers have a much bigger vocab than I do. Wallace, Joyce, Gibson, Harrison all use words that have me scratching my head. I can kinda see a little similarity in sentence cadence between them all, but I'm too close to my own writing to be able to see if mine's similar, so that may have something to do with it. In the higher action chapters where I'd be using simpler sentences, I get the Meyer, Rowling, Adams, Palahniuk, Rice, Puzo result. In the chapters where there's less action I get the Clarke, Gibson, Harrison result. And in the ones where the sentences drag out with introspection, I get the Joyce, Wallace, Mitchell, Wilde, Shakespeare results. The Doctorow and Salinger chapters, like I said, are political, so they're written almost in the style of a journalist. So I can see some influence in sentence structure, but not word choice. Anyway, I've spent way too much time on this already.
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Post by Becca Mills on Mar 31, 2014 15:30:18 GMT -5
It might be a lot simpler than that. If it picks up words like "space" and "orbit" and "planet," you get Clarke. If it picks up stuff like "uplink" and "computer" and "cyborg," you get Gibson. It if picks up "spell" and "magic" and "dragon," you get Rowling. If it picks up some $5 SAT words, you get Shakespeare. Use "blood" and "gun" and "beat" and you get Puzo. The section I pasted in had words like "beast" and "wind" and "once-paws," which sound sort of mythic/fantastical, so I got Gaiman.
Really, none of us write like Joyce. We're not using indirect free discourse. None of us write like Shakespeare -- 16th/17th century prose differs from the modern stuff. I don't think the thing's using a deep analysis of prose structure in order to make these pronouncements.
There is scholarly work on this sort of thing, and it's getting better, but it's super-sophisticated linguistically, driven by massive databases that break down authors' entire oeuvres according to parts of speech, sentence structures, and who knows what else. These programs are supposed to be able to take an author's textual "fingerprint" by finding consistent language patterns that override conscious choices he/she makes in adapting to different writing situations -- the kind of thing that would allow you to declare convincingly that Shakespeare wrote certain sections of a play heretofore not associated with him. If that kind of program came back with eight different author results within one book, that'd mean it wasn't working.
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Post by vrabinec on Mar 31, 2014 15:55:41 GMT -5
Of course I don't write like Joyce, his words all clamoring for attention and obscurity all at once, big and small, hidden in lists that taunt the reader into thinking the sentence is going to end, but it never does, because I control the words and the flow, don't you see?
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Post by Daniel on Mar 31, 2014 16:06:18 GMT -5
One the one hand, I'm sure the tool was just meant to be a fun exercise, and here we analyzed it to death and took all the fun out of it. On the other hand, it's a bummer when tools like this are useless to the point of being misleading.
Can you tell I'm disappointed about not really writing like Dan Brown? I need a hug.
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Post by Suzy on Mar 31, 2014 16:09:39 GMT -5
One the one hand, I'm sure the tool was just meant to be a fun exercise, and here we analyzed it to death and took all the fun out of it. On the other hand, it's a bummer when tools like this are useless to the point of being misleading. Can you tell I'm disappointed about not really writing like Dan Brown? I need a hug. ((((((((((((((((huggg))))))))))))))))))))))))) |
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Post by vrabinec on Mar 31, 2014 18:05:40 GMT -5
One the one hand, I'm sure the tool was just meant to be a fun exercise, and here we analyzed it to death and took all the fun out of it. On the other hand, it's a bummer when tools like this are useless to the point of being misleading. Can you tell I'm disappointed about not really writing like Dan Brown? I need a hug. No, see, in YOUR case, it's accurate. You write like Dan Brown. |
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Post by Daniel on Mar 31, 2014 18:26:30 GMT -5
One the one hand, I'm sure the tool was just meant to be a fun exercise, and here we analyzed it to death and took all the fun out of it. On the other hand, it's a bummer when tools like this are useless to the point of being misleading. Can you tell I'm disappointed about not really writing like Dan Brown? I need a hug. No, see, in YOUR case, it's accurate. You write like Dan Brown. Thanks, Fred...I think.  |
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Post by vrabinec on Mar 31, 2014 18:31:16 GMT -5
I like Dan Brown's writing.
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I've read Clarke and Joyce. I would never mistake one for the other. Clarke is dry. Joyce is rich. I find it hard to believe I'm switching between such polar opposites. I think it's based more on content than style. Something's triggering which author to choose besides actual style, methinks. 
