I Write Like
Jul. 13th, 2010 01:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersSeeing the "I Write Like" meme on a few of my Friends' pages, I started thinking about who has actually influenced me as a writer. It's not an easy question to answer, and my knee-jerk response to the meme is "I Write Like Myself". However, when I was taking creative writing courses in college my professor (Don Taylor) said my style (such as it was at the time) reminded him of J.D. Salinger, which was probably a reflection of the fact that I was reading Salinger at the time. He also recommended I read Heinrich Böll, because he thought he could see some resemblances there too. Not sure it's a good thing when your writing sounds as though it has been translated into English from German, especially when you don't speak German. At the time I would have preferred to write like Faulkner, but apparently it didn't come out that way.
Around that same era I was an avid reader of the SF and criticism of Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, and Thomas Disch, with John Crowley discovered a couple of years later and quickly rising to the same level in my estimation. In another writing class -- a one-on-one class with Linda Robertson -- she had me take a paragraph from a Joan Didion essay and replace each noun with a different noun, each verb with a different verb, each adjective with etc, using the resulting paragraph in a piece of my own on a different topic. That was so much fun that I promptly did the same with a Joanna Russ paragraph (from And Chaos Died) for a story I wrote for another Don Taylor class. Russ may well be the one writer I most wish I could write like. I love her precision, efficiency, terse lyricism, and mercurial shifts in tone. I love her sense of humor.
For my fannish writing I've often hearkened back to the two issues of Convention Girl's Digest, written by Sharee, Lucy Huntzinger, and Allyn Cadogan in the mid-'80s. Again, I loved the humor, the dreaminess, the chatty-friendly tone. carl and Denys were both big influences on my fannish writing style as well -- and thus on the writing in this LJ.
So if this meme could come back with "I Write Like a Poor Translation of Heinrich Böll" or "I Write Like Lucy Huntzinger" or "I Stole This Paragraph from Joan Didion", it might actually be saying something interesting.
Around that same era I was an avid reader of the SF and criticism of Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, and Thomas Disch, with John Crowley discovered a couple of years later and quickly rising to the same level in my estimation. In another writing class -- a one-on-one class with Linda Robertson -- she had me take a paragraph from a Joan Didion essay and replace each noun with a different noun, each verb with a different verb, each adjective with etc, using the resulting paragraph in a piece of my own on a different topic. That was so much fun that I promptly did the same with a Joanna Russ paragraph (from And Chaos Died) for a story I wrote for another Don Taylor class. Russ may well be the one writer I most wish I could write like. I love her precision, efficiency, terse lyricism, and mercurial shifts in tone. I love her sense of humor.
For my fannish writing I've often hearkened back to the two issues of Convention Girl's Digest, written by Sharee, Lucy Huntzinger, and Allyn Cadogan in the mid-'80s. Again, I loved the humor, the dreaminess, the chatty-friendly tone. carl and Denys were both big influences on my fannish writing style as well -- and thus on the writing in this LJ.
So if this meme could come back with "I Write Like a Poor Translation of Heinrich Böll" or "I Write Like Lucy Huntzinger" or "I Stole This Paragraph from Joan Didion", it might actually be saying something interesting.
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Date: 2010-07-13 08:28 pm (UTC)Walt Willis
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
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Date: 2010-07-13 08:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-13 08:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-13 09:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-13 09:16 pm (UTC)Then I put in a Ray Bradbury short story, and it told me that 'I' write like Stephen King. So I put a Stephen King story in, and it told me that 'I' write like Raymond Chandler. So I put the first chapter of 'The Big Sleep' in, and it told me that 'I' write like Charles Dickens.
Not exactly the most encouraging of results...
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Date: 2010-07-13 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2010-07-14 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-14 01:08 am (UTC)I had a class where we did that replacing-the-parts-of-speech exercise, and if you can keep it up after you get the feel for it, why not? Angela Carter was my favorite, and it wasn't even a story I had brought in. At the time I was wondering how Wendell Berry did it, but I think that was more a matter of content than style.
Thank you for a thoughtful post about this annoying thingy. I'm tired of calling them memes. What are they, semi-random code generators?
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Date: 2010-07-14 02:06 am (UTC)I think the annoying thing about that particular meme is that it isn't actually doing anything. If it was really attempting to analyze writing styles, it might be interesting even if the results were weird or wrong. But what the hell, I should go check out what's happening in the MLB All-Star game.
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Date: 2010-07-14 08:50 pm (UTC)no subject
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