A number of my regular blog-reads have been playing this week with a little doodad that analyzes a sample of your writing and determines which famous writer your style most resembles. Or something. (I cynically suspect it just grabs well-known names at random from a list. But maybe not. What do I know?)
Anyhow, I can’t resist trying these things out for myself, so I plugged in my angry “Synchcronicity II” blog entry from a couple weeks ago and this is what I got:
And you know what? That’s fine by me. In fact, it’s awesome. I’ve never felt like I had a “favorite author” the way many people espouse, no one whom I’ve felt compelled to study and memorize and read every single work by that person, but if I’m forced to pick someone, King is usually my answer. He’s vulgar, yes, and frequently self-indulgent, and when he’s off his game, he really stinks up the place. But when he’s good — and he is good more often than his detractors would have you believe — he’s brutally effective in taking readers where he wants them to go. I admire his plain-spoken prose style, his grasp of real-life detail, his ability to make the most outlandish threats seem immediate and real (at least as long as you’re under his spell), and of course his deep understanding of and empathy for lower-middle-class and working-class Americans, a demographic that’s rarely handled with a fair hand, in my opinion.
No other author makes me want to write fiction of my own the way I do after I read something of King’s (although my recent discovery Charlaine Harris comes close).
