I ran some of my writing through I Write Like, and got the startling result: I write like Dan Brown (you know, the author of The Da Vinci Code and other masterpieces). First I tried a blog post. Then I tried a direct mail letter. Dan Brown. Dan Brown. I'm thinking (hoping) there's something terribly wrong with I Write Like.
My friends were being compared to authors like James Joyce, David Foster Wallace, and Vladimir Nabokov.
Me? I write like a guy whose bestseller starts out like this:
Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.
(You can find more zingers at Author Dan Brown's 20 Worst Sentences)
After some self-recrimination, I settled down a bit. By putting both James Joyce and Dan Brown in the same database, they imply that the two authors are somehow alike. But they aren't, beyond the fact that books are published from their writing. Joyce created art. Reading it can be a challenge -- to put it mildly. The struggle of reading Ulysses or Finnegans Wake is part of their power; hard insights don't come easy.
Brown's books are not art. They are all about being read -- by lots of people -- people who have no intention of struggling to gain insight. They just want a story. Who am I to say there's anything wrong with that?
If you're a fundraising writer, you have a lot more in common with Dan Brown than with the Big Names in Literature. You want to be read. Not studied.
So I write like an author that a lot of people enjoy reading? There are worse things for a fundraising writer. (But darn it, why couldn't it say I write like Richard Brautigan, whose style is utterly lucid and easy to read, yet full of deep stuff?)
