“I Write Like”: A Fuck-You Letter, by the Author.

You may very well have tried the “I Write Like” website, which given a sample of your writing, “analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them to those of the famous writers,” giving you a little ego boost for those who need comparison or categorization for their writing, not to mention an HTML widget stating the same.

I won’t give you a link to the site, not because I think you can easily find it on your own, because if you couldn’t tell from my snide writing style, I’m mad at the site.

While it compared exerpts of my recent post about Gawker to Poe, and my recent short story, “The Passenger List” to Joyce, after putting in selections from my current novel in progress, from TEN VERY DIFFERENT PARTS, the site gave me a single comparison.

Dan Brown.

Okay, one part it found to be similar to Stephen King, but after nine punches to the stomach, that was like a finger flick to the forehead.

I was horrified all day. I repressed it immediately. It took me the rest of the day to even be able to admit that it was bothering me, let alone think about why. Why, exactly, a trifling website such as this, a poor excuse for a Facebook quiz, with absolutely no human input or even a description of its algorithm and rubric, might be making me desire to delete all 100K words of my in-progress work.

And now I lie back on the couch, to lay bare my sub-conscious to you, analyzing public.

First – a bit about me and “influences”. I have no influences. This is, of course, not to say that I am not influenced; language is a construct, culture is a vast scaffold, etc. There is only so many books a writer can read, and naturally, the words s/he create will be informed by those s/he has consumed. But I purposefully steer clear from “influential” writers, because I don’t desire to be influenced. I want to write things that are new, in a way that no one has heard before, to break tangentially off from the orbit of the major planets, and see what the limits of the imagination are. As much as that might be possible. I have never read Proust, only read one or two things of Borges, not touched Hammett or Chandler, and when finding something I really like, such as Pynchon, Grass, Sebald, or Melville, I often worry about returning there too often, perhaps reading only one work and moving on. Just enough to taste, but not enough to complete the all-too-human mind-meld that will result if I absorb an entire body of work. Instead, I seek out those writers whom I’ve never heard mentioned, or seem as if they might be influential, and yet somehow are largely ignored. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Gabriel Josipovici, László Krasznahorkai, and so on, and so forth. I particularly like the ones from Eastern Europe. If I stumble over the name, I am far less likely to play the name-checking game, and even forget what it is completely. I focus on the book, not the author.

And so, in the effort to have no influences, I strive not to be influenced. I think about my writing, and worry that it is too much like X, or far too similar to Y, or would the reader think in his/her mind, “oh, he must be a reader of Z”? I think about not having a “canonical” voice in my writing. There is not capital-L, Literature here. There is only the story. The words on the page are the sum of their parts. You are not walking into a famous architectural monument here. Instead, you are wandering into a dense woods, hopefully lost, and probably unfamiliar with the area and forests in general. Despite that, if the walk is still enjoyable, and you wander out the other side and onto a road without twisting your ankle or being hit by a speeding car on your emergence, then I’ve done what I set out to do.

Needless to say, I’m unpublished.

Second – because I want to choke myself to death when writing cover letters, because I want to blow air bubbles into my veins when I’m forced to “compare this work to other marketable fiction”, and because I would rather not write at all than aim to fit my production into some well-sold “literary category”, I’ve pretty much stopped sending out my work. It would be stupid to claim that I don’t care if my work is read, because first of all, I’m writing on my personal web site right now, and second, I do in fact write, so enough is said right there. But if getting read requires all of the above, which I wouldn’t dignify by calling it “whoring”, then, well, that’s the state of the work. It kills me that I would waste time doing that thankless task of “submitting”, which I hate, when all of those limited hours in the day could be spent actually writing. That’s the way my personal economy is balancing itself. The need to be read does not out-weigh the pain of publishing, and so I continue to write and not publish.

Not that I don’t harbor a secret (or not so secret) resentment against those who do publish. Sure, I’d like to be paid for doing what I like to do. I’d like to have people read my work, and tell me that they like it. Hell, they could tell me that they hate it, so long as they read it long enough to say so. And besides being an writer, I’m also a egotist–I think my writing is a lot better than a lot of writing out there, and the fact that I do not submit to submitting my work feels like a rationalization for capitulation. Maybe submitting is only so hard for me because my writing really isn’t worth publishing, and I neurotically re-assign the pain of necessary rejection into the pain of applying. Maybe those people who publish a memoirs of working at Starbucks or a book of short stories about the trials of a college internship in a foreign country ARE really better than me, and my disgust and contempt and resentment is a mask for my own feelings about myself.

And there’s no author I hate more than Dan Brown.

Third – Dan Brown is, by far, the worst writer in the English language. Now of course, that’s not entirely accurate. There is much writing that is worse, lurking underneath the surface of the English language. There is, of course, the Internet, of which you may have heard. Furthermore, there is plenty of actually published writing that is worse than his. But you see, I am beset by a long-standing animosity towards Dan Brown, stemming from several causes. I first read THAT book, that disgustingly-many-uninterrupted-weeks-on-the-NYT-best-seller-list-made-into-blockbuster-film-starring-Tom-Hanks book, as a Religious Studies major, so that I could respond and rebuke all the people who asked me what I thought of THAT book and did I not think it was overwhelmingly excellent, as soon as they found out I was a Religious Studies major. Well, as it turns out, he butchered history at his convenience in order to stitch together an adventure novel. The adventure novel being the second reason for my hatred. It is so formulaic of an adventure novel, I almost felt dry, freezer-burnt feeling of an overly air-conditioned theater as I read. Aging intellectual turned action hero saves world and gets attractive girl, far his junior. This I might be able to bear, if only every common literary device and trite trope didn’t fall over itself in jingoistic support for the cause. There are: exactly three story arcs (if I’m remembering correctly, it was like seven years ago), the quintessential ugly bad guy, the British traitor, the French converted authority figure. The text flows with stupid and demeaning metaphors. The bullshit gnostic philosophy is overwhelming. The complete lack of challenging emotions, ideas, linguistic constructions, or vocabulary make me feel as if the prose is a drunk TV hitting on me at a bar, and the page-turning cliff-hanger, at the end of EVERY GODDAMN CHAPTER becomes so expected that the real excitement might be the lack of one. The choke point of all of this being, despite how long we could go on critiquing, that this is exactly the sort of thing that appeals to the reading public as a whole. And hence, this is why it was so popular.

So is Dan Brown the worst writer in the English language, or the best? The very fact that I’ve arrived at this question is my point of frustration. Why must it be a balance between “popular” fiction and “challenging” fiction? It is this very dichotomy that I find myself up against, all the time. Should I strive to make my writing more publishable, or to be true to my writerly instincts? What does the latter even mean, given that my writerly instincts are both telling me that I desire to be published, and that I should murder the thought of being published, if this is what is required of me? Dan Brown is the embodiment of a horrible feedback loop in my personality–the feedback loop that pushes me to rebel against the majority, by increasing the desire to rebel as my rebellion is marginalized.

A rebellion which was, in this novel I’m writing, always already happening.

Fourth – Already occurring, because it was my writing of course, and so this feedback loop of resisting influence and resisting popularity and thereby giving rise to stress and thereby increasing the resistance, is all part of my writing process. Naturally. But that said, I was looking to really engage this of the course of this particular writing process. The novel I’m writing is about America, and its view of itself, and our sense of what to view ourself means, from a daily standpoint, and a historical standpoint. And because this is America, the land of Dan Brown on the best-seller list, this novel is not going to be written the way that I, the uninfluenced literary supremacist, would ordinarily think that it ought to be. I have written among my early notes, “this is the story about people who do not read.” What this means, is that it is not going to be a work of elegance, of self-conscious reflection and thorough critique. This work is not going to have a high vocabulary. This work is not going to be well-read, of influenced by great literary voices. This work is going to watch an average amount of television a day. It is going to live an average distance from one, or perhaps two malls. It is not going to strive to be published, let alone strive to do anything great at all. It is not going to get all deep on its own literary-inclined web site. It is going to watch porn. And lie about doing it.

This is a premise that the voice is dictated by the subject material, more than the audience or author. In other words, a careful section of narrator, based on what s/he is narrating. And so far,I seem to be doing pretty well with it in my novel, even if it’s coming out a little lengthy. It is clearly not a Dan Brown book. (Even though a section rife with profanity and sex managed to trigger the I Write Like daemon into still making the comparison. I don’t think Dan Brown ever implements the “C-word”. But maybe it’s all in the spirit of the text.) I still like the book, even if I am a little butt-hurt at the comparison. Perhaps then, this comparison tells me I’m on the right track. If my vocabulary and writing style sounds like something that the majority of Americans would like, then maybe I am capturing the inner-voice of the majority of Americans. Or at least, I’m capturing a majority of any particular American. Maybe, by channeling some computer algorithmically parallel version of Dan Brown into a book about Dan Brown’s readership, I’m actually exactly where I need to be.

Maybe I’ve learned to stop worrying, and be influenced by Dan Brown.

Fifth – So what does this say about influence, then? What does this say about the “writerly voice”? Does this mean that if one’s work “write’s like” Melville, then one is writing about a world filled with Melville’s? We do know, after all, that Ahab IS Melville, in many post-modern, meta-fictional ways. Just like any narrator is the author to a certain degree. But ought it to be? Is the world that we should be writing into existence a world of Melville’s, or a world of Pynchon’s, or a world of Adam Rothstein’s? By “faking” a narration that is not our own, are we being untrue to ourselves as writers? By adopting our “own” voice, are we not being creative enough? Should we be trying to portray the world as our conceptions of it dictate, or trying to cross those conceptions, or adopt the conceptions of others? Should we build the world in our image, in someone else’s, or in any particular image at all?

I don’t think I’ve found my writerly “voice”. There are definitely voices I slip into easily, from time to time. If you’ve read anything I’ve written, I’m sure you can tell. But there are different voices, that I pull out for different sorts of writing. There is my theoretical, explain-the-philosophy voice; my sardonic, cultural-critique/screw-the-bozos voice; my post-religious-studies post-hippie SF speculation voice; my cheap-dealing, underhandedly-poetic voice; my graven, eschatological, descriptive fiction narrators voice; my manic, can’t-write-fast-enough-to-stop-the-pain voice. Or maybe you can’t tell the difference between these voices, and they all sound the same to you. But I think of them differently, and use them like a set of tools, each for a particular writing job, as necessary. Maybe each one is built from several different influences, or maybe each tends towards a particular and different influence. I’m not sure this answers the question of what a narration or a voice “ought” to be, but it certainly seems more complicated than just the phrasing of the question.

So it very well could be that my novel in progress is using my Dan Brown voice, to feed my writerly feedback loops, to make something that is not anything like a Dan Brown novel.

Lastly – So have we learned that, in the end, the secret of the “I Write Like” website is human love? No. This is no fucking Dan Brown novel, and that website is still a piece of shit. Though I have to say that M was right, when we we’re talking about my lament yesterday. She suggested that the power of these sorts of comparison tools is like a Tarot reading. It isn’t the result that it gives, but it is how you respond to the results it gives, as if the results were real. Throughout the eight or nine months I’ve been working on this novel, I’ve had a lot of introspection and doubt, but none quite like this. I really went through the depths on this one. I was, actually, for about five seconds, about to delete the whole thing yesterday (though that might have been the cold medication speaking more than any particular real emotion). And now I feel a lot better about it. Hell, I might actually dig up a copy of a Dan Brown book, and look for often used vocabulary and metaphors, to make my book even more Dan Brown like!

Fuck no I won’t. I’d be happy if I never saw another used copy of The Di Vinci Code for the rest of my life. I’m going to need a stiff pour Stendhal or Pessoa just to be able to walk into a bookstore again.

[PS. And for this essay, because I must, the sections analyze to: 1 - Nabokov; 2 - Margaret Atwood; 3 - Steven King (though by going back and inflating the prose with some pretentious metaphors and similes I managed to turn it into Dan Brown); 4 - HP Lovecraft (???); 5 - Steven King; 6 - Dan Brown. The entire thing: Dan Brown. It's a slippery slope.]