Who do you write like?

A few years back, a writing friend of mine connected me with a fun site called “I Write Like...”

It is a simple site with a simple purpose. It lets you paste or type in an excerpt of your own writing and then the site tells you, in seconds, the name of a famous author who shares your writing style. It is fun and fast. Best of all, there is nothing to buy and no information required. If you try the site, I would recommend doing it with several different excerpts from your writing until you find a pattern emerging.

For my pattern, I found myself writing like men-in particular, Dan Brown. Now, I don't mind writing like a man since I enjoy hanging out with men at family reunions and social events and becuase most of the main characters in the books I write are men. I also don't mind writing like Dan Brown. He is a master at action-suspense and his ability to weave fact with fiction--two things I love in the books I read and write--will be talked about for generations.

But Dan Brown writes for adults and I am writing for the YA fiction market.

Now, as a reader of YA books, I enjoy Anthony Horowitz. He knows how to keep action flowing across the pages in YA novels.

Yet, no matter what action-packed passages I had the site analyze, it never said I wrote like Anthony Horowitz.

Then an unlady-like thought crossed my mind (probably because I do tend to hang out with men at family reunions and social events). I decided to see what would happen if I typed in an excerpt from an Anthony Horowitz novel. Would it say he writes like Anthony Horowitz?

So, I typed in two pages from his YA novel, The Skeleton Key.

Guess what? The site says he writes like--Rudyard Kipling!

If you want to have some fun and maybe a name or two to brag about with your writing style, just go to I Write Like

And if one of you writes like Dan Brown, Anthony Horowitz or Rudyard Kipling, you probably have a fast adventure style I would like.

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