Who do you write like?

From Mark Twain to Gertrude Stein to Kurt Vonnegut to Margaret Atwood?

Wandering through Substack the other day, I happened to spot this little item on a post from Alison McMahan. “Who Do You Write Like?” There was a little app, I guess it is, generated, I assume by AI. You simply had to check it out.

https://iwl.me/analyzer

Well, gee, as a writer of many years of all kinds on topics from The Three Stooges (yesterday) to Charles Dickens (several times) to boxing, U2, baseball (my new book “Diamond Duels”) to golf (Rory’s win) to Rod Stewart, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Bryan Ferry, chess and politics — as those of you who frequent this spot know, I was curious.

And the results were, well, all over the place. Yesterday, the author that came up most frequently was Kurt Vonnegut, quite a compliment. But when I sampled various Substacks on a wide range of topics, I got James Fenimore Cooper (don’t tell Mark Twain), Mark Twain (don’t tell James Fenimore Cooper), Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood and today, added Ray Bradbury, Chuck Palahniuk, Oscar Wilde, H.P. Lovecraft and David Foster Wallace.

Does your writing "echo" one of the literary greats?

Needless to say, that’s crazy. I’ve never read Atwood or Palahniuk or Wilde or Lovecraft or Conan Doyle. I know OF them but haven’t really read them. If I had to sit down and list the writers I’ve read the most, it’s probably Twain, Hemingway, Salinger, Chekhov, A.J. Liebling, Thoreau, Joseph Heller, Greil Marcus and Roger Angell. But there are so many more that I’m sure influenced me and my writing style — such as it is.

And it raises the question of style; Can you develop it? Are you more or less born with it? Is there a certain amount of bad writing that you have to get out of your system before the real stuff shows up?

In the 11 months and 358 posts I’ve written to date, one thing that really surprised me was re-reading a column I wrote some 42 years ago. It was about a high school wrestler who had dropped out of school. I’d seen him walking on Main Street when he should have been in school, wrote about it, found out he got into some trouble and dropped out. The column was sort of a plea for him to re-consider and he did and actually came into the office, stood in front of my desk with shaking hands and told me he was going back to school and wrestling again.

Why this struck me was I’d received a one-sentence letter some months earlier that I did not recognize. “He walked with the exaggerated swagger of a young man trying to draw attention to himself. And he succeeded.” It turned out to be the opening sentence of that column from 42 years earlier. The subject of the column, the note was unsigned, no return address, was telling me it made a mark.

What surprised me was, I didn’t think I could have written it any better NOW. So that either means I haven’t improved in the 42 years since or I was a pretty good writer then, just not a lot of people noticed. Or something in between.

When you’ve spent as much time as I have with your fingers on a keyboard, you sure as hell hope you’ve improved. While the AI app didn’t throw up it’s computer-arms and say, “You don’t write like anyone ever, meathead,” it was such a diversity of authors, I couldn’t put much stock in it. Do you? How does it work?

The most frequent comment I’ve heard from readers about my “style” is it’s “very conversational.” So evidently, I talk good. Of course, I’d prefer “lyrical” or “enlightening” or “stunning” or “eloquent.” But that’s where it is? Readers?

If you’re still with me here — and all these posts are still available on my Substack — see if you can make a connection between the Substack post and the famous author they connected it with. I sure can’t.

• “The Female Brain” - Ray Bradbury

• “Donald Trump’s Day Of Love” - Gertrude Stein

• “On Teaching Huck” - Mark Twain

• “Chekhov’s “Lady With The Dog”” - Oscar Wilde

• “Did Dickens Recognize His Breakthrough?” - Arthur Conan Doyle

• Can A Song Chart Your Life ("Every Picture Tells A Story”) - Edgar Allan Poe

• “Can You Figure Out FSU Baseball?” - James Fenimore Cooper

• “The Sadly Silent Paul Westerberg” - (Over 10,000 views) - Kurt Vonnegut