My friend posted this link to his Facebook wall yesterday along with a badge proclaiming that his writing style is like David Foster Wallace’s. Of course I had to rush off right away and try it for myself, with disappointing results. I entered sections of text from Tattoo and got Chuck Palaniuk. I did love Fight Club, the film, but I’ve never managed to get more than 30 pages into a Palaniuk story before discarding it. Sniffily, I repeated the experiment with a different passage and got Vladimir Nabokov. Another writer I’ve never “gotten.” Curious to see if the program would generate the same result each time, I entered text from Bleat and She Alone Can Move Me, varying from strictly prose sections to heavy dialogue, and was told that I write like Stephenie Meyer, Ursula LeGuin and Stephen King. With the exception of some of King’s earlier works (I devoured “Carrie” when I was a teen), more authors I haven’t read. I pasted in a few ‘graphs of a recent email to a friend and finally received the laudable “Your write like David Foster Wallace.”

The process left me wondering how many authors were included in the list of comparisons. How many were women vs men? Were there any writers of color? Any international writers? If the test compares your style to modern American authors, ok. The results left me tepid. I’d hoped to be surprised, even rewarded (“You write like Tanith Lee, Dorothy Parker and Anais Nin all rolled into one!”). I suspect that the program is a simple algorithm that analyzes keywords, sentence length and structure, and prose vs dialogue. How can we really write like other authors, even when we try? Though many genres seem homogenized, there’s always a distinct tweak to the style that differentiates it from other writer’s voices, for better or worse.

I suspect that this program was created by one guy–mid 20s-mid 30s, college educated, white, single or married but dreamy/drifty and vaguely unhappy, someone who doesn’t wash his jeans too often and probably sports a subtle affectation of scruffiness because A) he thinks it makes him look cool and hearkens back to some Beatnik ideal and B) it displeases his mother)–and comprises the sum total of his cultural and literary awareness. He has never read bell hooks, Kobo Abe, Jewelle Gomez, Chinua Achebe, Angela Carter or Kathe Koja. Maybe I’m just being snarky. Maybe I’m just creating another character.

By the way, after pasting this post in the analyzer, I’m told I now I write like Jonathan Swift.

Kirsten Imani Kasai

PS!

Hey! I’m going to be at Comic Con Saturday July 24, so I hope you’ll stop by and check out my panel (one of i09′s “don’t miss” events!)

Welcome to The Future: Are You Sure You Want to Stay?-
Speculative fiction authors discuss visions of the future, dystopian and otherwise. Authors include Samuel R. Delany (Dhalgren), Alan Dean Foster (Flinx Transcendent), Cody Goodfellow (Perfect Union), Kirsten Imani Kasai (Ice Song), Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin (The Unincorporated War), Nnedi Okorafor (Who Fears Death), David Weber (Honor Harrington novels), David J. Williams (The Machinery Of Light), and Charles Yu (How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe). Moderated by Maryelizabeth Hart of Mysterious Galaxy.
When: 4:30-5:30
Where: Room 4

OK, that really has nothing to do with my post. It was just a random Seinfeld moment. (Mandelbaum!)

When all this book stuff start kicking off in Nov. 2007, I was so excited I couldn’t sleep for about three weeks. Sleep deprivation turned a minor cold into a nasty sinus infection, which in turn wreaked havoc on my head-innards, resulting in total blockage and a lot of misery. Last Wednesday, my doctor, a very lovely and conscientious woman and her stellar OR team broke apart the little eggshell thin bones in my sinuses and snipped out the offensive tissue. Now, a very small man could probably go spelunking in there. It was a roller coaster week of evaluating the possible complications and trying to make peace with the idea of waking up blind or not at all, brain fluid leaking from my head, mysterious, unstoppable geysers of blood…I could go on. I’ve quite the imagination for gore, you know. I came home, woozy from anesthesia and promptly went to bed, where I stayed for three days. How lovely to have a valid excuse to avoid domestic tedium! I read, watched many eps. of Bones and slept and dreamed.

Doing nothing is creatively fruitful. While I was too weary to write, I spent much time thinking, a highly underrated pastime. It is one of my favorite hobbies, second only to drinking whiskey and eating cookies. We are afforded precious little time to simply sit and mull. What fun it is!

I’m ready to get back to work and pin down some of those ideas before they’re gone. The blank spot that is the two hours of lost consciousness is like a demarcation line separating before and after. Whatever writing-related agonies that manifested in my tissues over the past 3 years have been excised. A loop is pulled closed. There is a sense of something having been taken from me, allowing me to move forward less burdened. I’m not prone to sentiment or applying meaning to random occurrences, but a part of me is convinced that there’s something terribly profound in choosing to face death (however likely or unlikely the possibility), and its silent black nothingness.

Worries about what would happen to my next book flitted nervously about. We haven’t even begun the line edit yet. What if something terrible happened to me? Would Tattoo die too? Could I assign its completion and editorial duties to a friend or team of friends? It would be like selecting a godparent for my child. Would anyone be willing to take the responsibility? In the end, I convinced myself there was no need to be extra-morbid and adopted a very que sera, sera attitude about the whole thing, and here I am, alive to write another day.

I can breathe easy now, literally and figuratively. Let the line edit commence!