HP Lovecraft Does Not Write Like HP Lovecraft, Apparently

I have noticed my writing becoming slightly more Lovecraftian as I have been reading his work. Is this a real thing, I asked myself, or am I just seeing tics I always had but only noticed now because Lovecraft is on my mind? There’s plenty of Lovecraft in sci-fi/fantasy, after all, plenty of vectors for me to have osmosed the ideas continuously long before I started reading multiple Lovecraft stories in a row. Plus, five-ish years ago when I read a few of the famous ones, it’s always possible that they permanently lodged something in my writing style that I just didn’t notice until now.

And hey, I thought to myself, wasn’t there an online tool that analyzes what famous author your writing style most resembles? My recollections were accurate, but I still wondered if the tool itself was accurate. I pasted in the thousand-ish words I had written the previous day, and apparently I write like Agatha Christie. “Neat,” I thought, “but how reliable is that, really? Does this tool accurately categorize writing style at all, or is it basically just noise?” I decided to test it by pasting in bits of the same story written considerably earlier. This website’s consistent opinion is that I write like Agatha Christie. “Seems solid,” I thought, but ever the skeptic, it also occurred to me: “What if this thing is just weighted strongly towards Agatha Christie for some reason?” So I dug up some of the writings that occasional commenter Longes had sent me, and the algorithm pretty consistently says that he writes like JK Rowling. I don’t really get that vibe from Longes’ writing, but while the algorithm may be picking up on different elements than humans care about, it does at least seem to consistently sort writers into different buckets.

So then I thought, “let’s see if this algorithm can correctly sort writings by the others in its own database.” So I confirmed that Lovecraft was in the database, copy/pasted Lovecraft’s Old Bugs into the page, since that’s the story I was reading and I had it open for quotation, and then double checked by also analyzing a few thousand words of the Shadow Over Innsmouth, just in case there was a style shift that would confuse the algorithm.

HP Lovecraft does not write like HP Lovecraft, apparently.

He writes like Agatha Christie.