This week in double rainbows I mean publishing…
Stephen Parrish pointed me to a NY Times survey of the world of book trailers, those magical creatures that use video to convince us we should read books. While only 0.1% of everyone out there decided to purchase a book via a book trailer, the kids these days seem to love them according to an online survey at Teenreads.
And speaking of viral, the I Write Like app was positively ubiquitous this week, though if anyone can prove that it’s more than a random author generator I’d love to see it. I plugged the first chapter of JACOB WONDERBAR in and it said I write like James Joyce. So….. yeah. Thank goodness ULYSSES is the most popular novel of all time among children eight to twelve.
William Faulkner speaks!! Some of Faulkner’s lectures to students have been uploaded and can be found here. I actually needed some occasional translation help from my Southern wife due to Faulkner’s incredible accent, but was totally hooked by his lecture on What Makes Man Endure especially. Faulkner’s vision for the last sound on Earth during the end of times: two people arguing about where they’re going to go in their spaceship. Oh, actually three, because one will be writing a book about it.
Author Janet Fitch wrote a really terrific Top 10 Tips for Writers, which I thought was way better than most Top 10 Tips for Writers lists. Some of my favorite parts: Write the sentence, not just the story, Kill the Cliche, and most importantly: Write in scenes. (via Jacket Copy)
Society of Authors chair Tom Holland spoke out against industry standard e-book royalties, calling them “not remotely fair.”
And over at the Guide to Literary Agents blog, Chuck Sambuchino put together a great overview of the different sections in a nonfiction book proposal.
This week in the Forums: insanely cute kittens, a study shows that competition may impact creativity, which character is the favorite you’ve ever written, and, of course, how did you come up with that?
Comment! Of! The! Week! goes to Kerry Gans, who I thought had some good insight on the question of why it’s so hard to tell whether our own writing is good. Could it be a visual thing?:
Maybe because my typed Word document looks the same as everyone else’s typed Word document. What I mean is that you can see that you can’t jump as high as the NBA guys, or that the person you drew looks more like freaky tree, or hear that your guitar riff sounds like your cat scratched it out. But my words typed on a page look pretty much the same as JK Rowlings’.
I also think it might be because writing is so much a “felt” art — you are so invested in what you write that it “feels” good to you. How could you work so hard and put so much of yourself into it and have it NOT be good?
And I think the industry itself makes it hard, because so much of it is subjective. There are some truly awful books that have made it to print, and some very good ones that probably have not. This subjectivity makes it hard to measure how good your work is. As Jon VanZile said above: “There’s no way to keep score.”
And finally, after linking to everyone’s favorite Double Rainbow video yesterday, I’d be remiss if I didn’t plug the Double Rainbow song, which is also incredibly incredible. If only I could figure out WHAT DOES IT MEAN:
Have a great weekend!
I will say that the "I write like" app is consistent. I put in over a chapter each from 3 different works in progress of mine, and every time it told me I write like Stephen King.
Then again, maybe it just looks for key words and since I write mysteries with "death," "murder," and "body" in the first couple of chapters, it made a mistake.
Comment of the Week man has brilliant insight. Well done.
Kristi
I can't prove that "I write like" is anything more than a random author generator, but I can offer up a result that gave me pause. I entered everything from blogs, to posts, to excerpts from my WIP and came up with results ranging from Shakespeare to Wallace to King to Atwood. I was completely thinking the results were random. Then, on a whim, I entered a piece of Twilight fan fiction and I got the result Stephanie Meyer. So, coincidence? Maybe. But her name didn't come up with any of the other things I entered….
Apparently my first paragraph is Stephen King, my first chapter is James Joyce, my second chapter is Agatha Christie and my third Douglas Adams.
Oh dear me.
"It's so intense-tense."
(I may be driving my husband crazy listening to this on repeat.)
I decided to put three different chapters of one of my WIP's into that "I write like" app and was given two Dan Browns and an H.P. Lovecraft.
I then did the same thing with my other WIP and was told that I write like H.G. Wells, James Joyce and Vladimir Nabakov.
I don't really know what that says about my writing.
I just went to "I write like…" and typed in:
"double rainbow double rainbow double rainbow"
Like the magic eight ball, it answered!!
It said:
I write like Ian Fleming!
WHAT DOES IT MEAN!!!!!!!!!????????
That double rainbow song is actually pretty good? I'm so buying it on itunes.
Well, Cameron, that app said I write like King, too. I plugged in the first 250 from my middle-grade. Maybe it was the use of "bony," and "enemies." idk
I do know I've never read a King novel. Having seen Carrie in Jr. High was enough to freak me out for life.
Nathan, I forgive you for posting that video. I may never get the song out of my head, but I forgive you.
Okay, this has been my big science experiment/game this week.
I Write Like isn't completely random, but as Cameron said I think it's as much about keywords as anything else.
If you fill the writing sample box with just one keyword over and over, you can start to see how it "thinks."
Fill the sample text box with "elephant," it'll say you write like Kipling. "Magic" gives you Rowling, "ring" gives you Tolkien, "Volvo" gives you Meyer, and so on.
So while it says it looks at your writing style, I think it's mostly looking at your keyword frequencies compared to the frequencies in number-crunched works by the authors it compares you to.
And now a certain part of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is nagging at the back of my mind…
I got James Joyce in the I Write App too. Then I put, "Magic fun ha" in about 50 times, and suddenly I was JK Rowling.
IT'S SO LEGIT.
I plugged in the exact same blog post two different times at I WRITE LIKE and had two different answers: Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace.
Nathan,
This is one of the most entertaining This Week in Publishing blog posts ever.
Thanks.
(just tell us that double rainbow guy isn't your evil twin!!)
bwaaa haaaa haaaa
i was sure iwl was random, so i tried to fool it. i took several passages from my book and entered them multiple times randomly. the authors it correlated the passages with were always the same. so, it's not completely random. but as to WHAT data it uses to make its claims, i have no idea!
I think other people are right, with the IWL app not being random, but having to do more with the use of certain key words. Plug in Harry Potter fanfiction and you get JKR, but the same thing happens if you just write "Harry" over and over again.
I put in "The Nightingale and the Rose," and got Neil Gaiman. Putting in The Picture of Dorian Gray gave Oscar Wilde…
Gah! On CNN "Double Rainbow Guy: No sex, drugs here"
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2010/07/15/vasquez.double.rainbow.guy.cnn?hpt=C2
I actually got Chuck Palahniuk (why do I still have to google his name every time I spell it?) for several different pieces. Now, I'm not saying I write like him, but at least the thing's consistent! And consistently entertaining!
I'd love to watch the Faulkner lectures, only the library at UVA insists on using Quicktime, which doesn't work in Linux.
Are librarians supposed to support open formats so that these things will be easily watchable in fifty years time?
*grumble*
Yes, I'm hoping that app is not too accurate :)… 1st Chapter – Dan Brown (which I've actually heard before from an agent… not in a good way 😉 — I can handle Dan Brown…
But chapter 2 — Stephenie Meyer… I'm hoping it's because of the romance words 🙂
Chapters 3 – 5… David Foster Wallace… at least getting some consistency 🙂
Thanks for the links.. A nice distraction.
"The best is the best, and the best is to put inside the covers of a book the complete turmoil and experience and insight of the human heart…" – Faulkner
This library of lectures is fantastic. I will be busy with this for days…
Wow,I write like sure is distracting. I'm relieved to see I'm not the only one who got different writers, especially when I'm just about finished with my editing. I'm mostly James Joyce and David foster, chapter by chapter, but when I put is all in (yes, I really am that sad) it came up with Chuck Palaniuk, so not sure how that works. It kept me distracted for a while though, thanks Nathan!
I wrote like:
Stephen King, Chuck Palahnuik and J.K. Rowling!
Um, right.
I put in chapters individually of two MSS and individual short stories I'd written. I think it analyzes SOMETHING, but what I don't know:
Lesser Evils: 46% Dan Brown, 30% James Joyce, 6% H P Lovecraft, and 3% each Stephen King, Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Mario Puzo, J K Rowling, and (wtf?) Edgar Allan Poe.
Postmortal: 65% Stephen King, and 7% (a chapter a piece) Douglas Adams, H P Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, and Vladimir Nabokov.
I won't do a chapter by chapter breakdown of Lesser Evils since it's boring, but I will share the breakdown of Postmortal because I find it very interesting.
Chapter 1: Kurt Vonnegut
Chapter 2: Douglas Adams
Chapter 3: Vladimir Nabokov
Chapter 4: Stephen King
Chapter 5: Stephen King
Chapter 6: Stephen King
Chapter 7: Isaac Asimov
Chapter 8: Stephen King
Chapter 9: H P Lovecraft
Chapter 10: Stephen King
Chapter 11: Stephen King
Chapter 12: Stephen King
Chapter 13: Stephen King
Chapter 14: Stephen King
It suggests that I tried a variety of influences before settling on a Stephen King style.
As for my short stories, the results are this:
BOOM – Chuck Palahnuik
The End of the World – Margaret Atwood
A Typical Morning – Stephen King
You Are – Stephen King
Bitter Hands – Stephen King
We Are – Arthur Conan Doyle
I Am – Oscar Wilde
Peeping Tom – Chuck Palahniuk
Solo Pillow Talk – Dan Brown
Language is a Playground – Margaret Atwood
Eight True Things – Chuck Palahniuk
You're right. It is incredibly incredible…
I don't believe IWL is deliberately bogus, but for all purposes, it's a random name generator. Comparing the vocabulary of a couple of paragraphs to a text of novel length can hardly produce relevant results.
I just thought it was funny.
I'm in the process of rewriting my WIP. So I plugged in Chapter 1 from the old version and apparently it said I wrote like David Foster Wallace. But then I plugged in my rewritten Chapter 1 and it said I wrote like Ursula K. Le Guin.
Is Le Guin an improvement over Wallace? A digression? Or just a whole different ball game? Who knows.
Haven't read either author. Perhaps, now I should….
LOL, I got Charles Dickens & Stephen King. What a combination.
This week has been SO INTENSE.
I used the I Write Like app on a couple different pieces, and there were a few passages where I could understand the comparison to X author, but I'm mostly inclined to agree that it's a random generator with only about ten authors' names plugged into it.
Go Comment of the Week! I never really thought about the fact that all our manuscripts look pretty similar, just looking at the screen. Of course we tend to think they're all equal.
Yeah, "I Write Like…" is probably b.s., but you know what? I just needed someone to tell me I write like Kurt Vonnegut and to believe it for two seconds. Now it's back to reality.
I'm apparently Kurt Vonnegut or David Foster Wallace like Felicity. Perhaps the app can't make up it's mind because we write in different voices for different purposes? And if we all accept that there isn't really anything new, just the same things presented in a new way, then it makes sense. We write according to our influences and there are other people in the universe who share our perspective. Did we need a computer analysis to tell us?
Nathan, I am swooning — SWOONING — over the mere idea of listening to Faulkner lectures when I get home from work today. I believe the only Faulkner recording I've heard until now has been his Nobel acceptance speech (which I love).
Thanks for inspiring me to get the rest of my pesky report for my day job finished.
I agree that "I write like," if nothing else, is consistent. I plugged several different chapters of my work in there and they all came up either Joyce or Vonnegut (we all know that Joyce and Vonnegut are peas in a pod, right?). I also plugged the same chapter in a few times, and it always came up with the same response. I wonder why it never comes up with some crap author?