So, about a year ago, I decided to step into writing. I loved reading, albeit I'm not very cultured in literature. Especially English, since I've only used it as a second language. Still don't know why I picked English to start writing, but who cares?
Recently, I found this site: iwl.me, which analyzes your text and tells you to whose writing your writing they found similar. I took some excerpts from my book I'm currently still in the process of writing, and got lots of results, but mainly Dan Brown.
Now, from what I can gather, people hate the ever-living fuck out of Dan Brown. Please, elaborate, /lit/, why? I'd love to be a writer and release my own book, and I need your help to see where Dan Brown falls short to avoid these pitfalls. Thanks in advance.
It's a dud site. Change the words around a little and it'll say Herman Melville. Sites like this provide basic meme software and make their money on ads and pageviews. Literally delete this thread and then yourself.
>>7784071
It's a good feel.
I'll wear this badge with pride.
>>7784079
Makes sense. Still doesn't answer my question on literary pitfalls, though. I'll commit honorable sudoku once I've gotten my answer, senpai.
>>7784080
*tips*
But seriously, I got two different authors once by changing 'Astrid' to 'Julia'.
>>7784080
I got that one, too. I'm guessing it is a dud website.
>>7784091
Welp, I guess this settles it, then. IWL is a dud website and I'm a faggot for believing it, confirmed 2016.
cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck cuck
I write like:
James Joyce
>>7784087
>Still doesn't answer my question on literary pitfalls, though.
How Not to Write a Novel might have what you're looking for.
First chapter got Rudyard Kipling.
Ninth chapter got Anne Rice.
Unfinished 15th chapter got Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
I've real all of those authors. The ones I write most like is a hybrid between Jean M Auel and Piers Anthony. So yeah, fake ass-shit and dud confirmed.
>>7784104
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll look into it. Now, onto suicide!
>hate David Foster Wallace
>write like Wallace
Well, I'm certainly psychologically complex enough to be a troubled author.
big black cocks in my wife meme cuck
Your Badge
I write like
James Joyce
>>7784071
step ya game up, kid.
>>7784152
>Working on a shifting PoV book
>one character sounds like Wallace, the other sounds like William Gibson
>tfw got Shakespeare
>tfw shit writters
Yeah, this thing is bs, it's like the MBTI but with writing.
>>7784165
>I write like Leo Tolstoy
>in English
now that's some bullshit
>>7784071
I got DFW. I think mine's more embarrassing tbqh
>>7784189
>there is no salve for burns like this
Kek. It can say my writing is like DFW's or like Lovecraft's depending on the presence or absence of a space after the end point.
Confirmed bullshit.
'Anne Rice is an American author of gothic fiction, Christian literature, and erotica'.
I'm guessing she's a complete meme author and I should be ashamed of myself?
>>7784213
yep. can't beat the Tolstoi
>>7784213
Wrote out the second passage of the book I'm trying to write, and now I get this shit. My book is about cuckoldry - what do women know about that? I just wrote the word 'love' several times in each passage, and I'm guessing that's why I've got female authors.
>>7784236
Forgot image.
>>7784071
>What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.
Lmao
Lol
I put "I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it."
Got Chuck P
>>7784279
>I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.
>But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?
>It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."
>Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.
>Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.
>I write like Vladimir Nabokov
nigga i ain't read any of this motherfuckaz books
>Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water. When she closed her eyes at last, Dany did not know whether she would be strong enough to open them again. She dreamt of her dead brother.
>>7784313
Accorcing to the site, Nabokov writes like H.P Lovecraft.
Apparently the lyrics to Waka Flocka Flame's "Hard in da Paint" are written like William Gibson
>>7784333
Hit em Up from 2pac is also like Gibson. He apparently had a big influence in gangsterrap
DFW for the entire blog post that I used.
Leo Tolstoy for one part of it. Cory Doctorow for another part of it.
Yeah, right.
>upoo niga kapaaao no se cheque hahahaaaaaaan upoo LA VERDAD tropicall upoo niga kapaaao no se cheque hahahaaaaaaan upoo LA VERDAD tropicall upoo niga kapaaao no se cheque hahahaaaaaaan upoo LA VERDAD tropicall upoo niga kapaaao no se cheque hahahaaaaaaan upoo LA VERDAD tropicall upoo niga kapaaao no se cheque hahahaaaaaaan upoo LA VERDAD tropicall upoo niga kapaaao no se cheque hahahaaaaaaan upoo LA VERDAD tropicall upoo niga kapaaao no se cheque hahahaaaaaaan upoo LA VERDAD tropicall
>Tanto que tú dices que te vas, y tanto que tú dices que te vas. Me amenazas, me amenazas con que te marchas. Me amenazas, me amenazas con que te marchas. Dobla a la derecha y a la izquierda, coge el pasillo, está la puerta. ¿A que no haces nada? De verdad, de verdad, de verdad. Y entonces se me sube arriba y me domina, me domina. Las mujeres no deben sudar, las mujeres no deben sudar. El sudor no se hizo para las mujeres.
Joyce again.
>>7784071
>He approached the prisoner warily, holding his breath, and yanked off the man’s hood, exposing a disturbing visage that Wilson immediately recognized from captured spy photos and combat footage. It was a face—and mask—that inspired nightmares in the bloodier corners of the globe.
Dark eyes gleamed above an intimidating dark blue mask that concealed the bottom half of the man’s face, covering his nose, mouth, and chin. The mask, made of rubber with riveted metal components, was held there in part by a thick vertical strap that bisected the mercenary’s brow and hairless cranium. Two rows of coiled steel breathing tubes ran above and below some sort of built-in inhaler that covered the man’s mouth. It gave his face a vaguely skull-like appearance. Pipes ran along the edges of the mask to a pair of miniature canisters at the back of his skull. Air hissed as he breathed. No sign of fear showed in the man’s piercing eyes. He spoke calmly, and with complete assurance.
“Who we are does not matter,” Bane said. “What matters is our plan.”
Wilson was fascinated by the man’s elaborate headwear, which resembled a specialized gas mask. Was it there purely for effect, or did the breathing apparatus serve some vital function? He gestured at it.
“If I pull this off, will you die?”
“It would be extremely painful,” Bane answered.
Good to know, Wilson thought. He had no sympathy for the ruthless mercenary. Bane was a bad guy who deserved to suffer. “You’re a big guy.”
“For you,” Bane clarified.
A chill ran down Wilson’s spine, but he tried not to show it. It was important to remain in control of the interrogation.
“Was being caught part of your plan?”
“Of course,” Bane said. “Dr. Pavel refused our offer, in favor of yours. We had to know what he told you about us.”
“Nothing!” the scientist shouted from his seat. He sounded absolutely terrified by Bane’s presence, even though the mercenary was safely in custody. Pavel’s eyes were wide with fright. He called out frantically, as though he was pleading for his life. “I said nothing!”
>>7784351
I just got James Joyce for this:
Tu, tu hai vohi, dil ne jise, apna kaha.
"wergiuwherighairghaioergjvoierajgvoiaerhjgoijeroaig"
>I write like Agatha Christie
>>7784093
It is. I ran a passage from The Road through it, and apparently McCarthy's prose is similar to Stephen King.
>>7784320
why, ya jelly?
Do i win a prize or something ?
Are there any actual good websites that do this sort of thing? Not necessarily what author the writing is like but more advice-based, maybe even just for typos etc
>inb4 /lit/'s critique thread
>>7784387
>implying that's wrong
this is pointless because it cant actually indicate how good the writing is, its probably some very basic metrics and it gets the nearest set
>>7784354
Haha fuck my sides
Got Arthur Conan Doyle, added another sentence and got Nabokov.
>>7784499
it may be accurate as shit, if it's just a public facing version of the software historians use to try to figure out who wrote anonymous shit back in the day, you can easily identify people by their writing style, academics use this, but even more fbi and cia use it to track drug dealers, terrorists and assorted other internet evil doers
witness me
Apparently I have no discernable talent.
>>7784213
Anne Rice writes vampire novels for girls.
Patrician writing incoming
I've done it a few times, and I always get Joyce or Stoker.
jesus christ it's either dan brown HP Lovecraft or JK Rowling
>>7784309
Are you kidding? That's great.
>>7785023
It's completely real.
>>7784387
That's both hilarious and one of the few times this shit has been right. Memecarthy BTFO.
iwl is a meme. very inaccurate.
holy shit lol
As an Irish American, I'm proud
>>7784634
Got the same: witness me blood-bag!
I copied excerpts from Aldous Huxley's Door of Perception and got David Foster Wallace
>>7784080
Why in God's name would you be proud to write like fucking Tolkein?
I'd argue that his prose is worse than GRRM's.
Guess I'm high school English class tier
>whfoisdoij foiwj poi poi pio fpo po wi oijowi fo io jfoi jweoij foi if iof iof o fi eif ie iow ie fi oiwjo wo woowoow oo
>DFW
>>7785199
That's clearly Joyce; not enough footnotes
>First paragraph of 50 Shades of Grey
>DFW
>>7784071
nah
Gaming trailers do not seem to be rich in content
>And there's something terribly sad and banal about that.
>>7784213
cheer up anon there's good money in that shit
>ugoo booga boogy boo AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA effy effy efyy UGGOOOO ugoo booga boogy boo AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA effy effy efyy UGGOOOO ugoo booga boogy boo AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA effy effy efyy UGGOOOO ugoo booga boogy boo AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA effy effy efyy UGGOOOO ugoo booga boogy boo AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA effy effy efyy UGGOOOO ugoo booga boogy boo AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA effy effy efyy UGGOOOO ugoo booga boogy boo AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA effy effy efyy UGGOOOO ugoo booga boogy boo AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA effy effy efyy UGGOOOO ugoo booga boogy boo
>>7784071
>It was a dark day when I set out. The clouds hovered low above me, ominous, depriving me of the sun's warmth. There was a darkness in my soul.
>>7784213
I like her writing but of course since she's successful and contemporary /lit/ hates her
Pasted an essay I wrote the other week
I put in three different pieces and got DFW each time.
Then I put in Gogol's The Overcoat and it said he wrote like DFW too
Then some Sound and the Fury excerpts came up as Oscar Wilde
>>7785809
Two separate Proust excerpts came up as Daniel Defoe and Mary Shelley
DFW excerpt is DFW
Joyce's The Dead is Joyce and so is a Finnegans Wake excerpt
Poe's The Raven is Shakespeare
Whitman's Learn'd Astronomer is Arthur Clarke
Gass' Tunnel is James Joyce
#include <stdio.h>
int main (int argc, char *argv) {
printf("Hello World!\n");
return 0;
}
I put in 81 lines of Polish code that I found on pastebin and it says that's how Dan Brown writes.
http://pastebin.com/4KvLM3Lf
You guys realise that this thing is completely pointless, right? Even if you put in a named author's work it'll come up as a different one as >>7785830 and >>7785809 have noticed.
>>7785195
>reading only catcher, his worst
>A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
This program is fucking retarded
>>7787445
>OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
>Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
>Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
>With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
>Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
>Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
>Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
>That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
>In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
>Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill
>Delight thee more, and Siloa's Brook that flow'd
>Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
>Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
>That with no middle flight intends to soar
>Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues
>Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
>And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
>Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
>Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
>Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
>Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
>And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
>Illumin, what is low raise and support;
>That to the highth of this great Argument
>I may assert Eternal Providence,
>And justifie the wayes of God to men.
This program is absolutely FUCKING retarded
>I was up late reading about tennis on InterLace and it gave me a case of the howling fantods. And but so there is something terribly sad and banal about this.
hmm
