ChatGPT's Take on 100 Stories in 2025: "Literary Twins"
A 3-part series. I fed my 2025 monthly stories into ChatGPT to identify the "Top 100 Moments," "Literary Twins," and "Create a Story in the Style of Adam Nathan." Here are its "Literary Twins."
Part 2 of 3:
Yesterday, I asked ChatGPT to write a story in the style of the work I posted in 2025. Today, it looks at which known works and writers are closest to each.
Literary Twins (Closest Matches for Each Story to Known Works)
The Top 100 Stories Moments of 2025
If you are not familiar with AI, you should know that it has a strong tendency towards sycophancy. Take its flattery with a grain of salt and then some.
Know that I do.
AI’s “Literary Twins” for Adam Nathan’s 2025 Stories
ChatGPT’s understanding of the prompt:
“The user wants me to include comments about the writing craft/style itself, not just thematic similarities. I should note how the literary techniques, voice work, structure, prose style, etc. connect between the Adam Nathan 2025 stories and the known works.”
1. PHILADELPHIA FREEDOM & “We Were the Mulvaneys” (Joyce Carol Oates) Both use young female narrators processing sexual trauma they can barely articulate. Lauren’s “maybe I had been” mirrors Marianne’s fragmented assault memory. Working-class families, 1970s setting, mothers who can’t protect, the casual predation of older men. Writing: Same unreliable narrator technique—teenage voice that knows/doesn’t know simultaneously. Oates’s run-on breathlessness = Nathan’s lack of paragraph breaks. Both trust the reader to understand what the narrator can’t say.
2. PIGEONS & “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (Flannery O’Connor) Southern Gothic grace erupting in violent systems. Chester’s pigeons = the Misfit’s revelation. Both feature manipulators (Chester/the grandmother) whose lies accidentally become truth. “You’re one of my own children!” / “I ain’t your soft apple.” Writing: O’Connor’s theological irony = Nathan’s “soft apple” reversal. Both use flat, reportorial prose for supernatural events. No italics, no exclamation points at the miracle. The restraint makes grace more powerful.
3. THE MARQUESAN TATTOO & “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (Oscar Wilde) Portrait as moral reckoning. Both feature aristocratic murderers, art that reveals hidden sin, supernatural justice through imagery. The portrait’s layers peeling back = Dorian’s painting aging. Victorian prose, colonial guilt, aestheticized revenge. Writing: Nathan sustains Wilde’s high Victorian diction flawlessly for 8000+ words—”post-haste,” “belowstairs,” “tincture.” Zero contemporary slippage. The formality isn’t parody; it’s mastery of register.
4. JACK LONDON & “Of Mice and Men” (Steinbeck) Depression-era masculine codes, dreamers versus pragmatists. Denver = Lennie (romanticizing); Bonecrack = George (killing the dream to save the dreamer). “This ain’t no story” / “Tell me about the rabbits.” Writing: Steinbeck’s dialogue vernacular = Nathan’s hobo voices (Mickey, Steel Rail, Bonecrack—all distinct). Same technique: character through grammar, not description. “I ain’t reading it” tells you everything about Mickey.
5. I LOVED AMERICA & “Howl” (Allen Ginsberg) Catalog as elegy, anaphora as incantation, America as lost love. “I saw the best minds” / “I loved America for.” Both accumulate specific cultural artifacts to mourn what’s gone. Whitman’s children. Writing: Same risk of sentimentality transcended through rhythm and specificity. “Because Bob Dylan” = “who poverty and tatters.” The catalog form allows emotion without explaining it. Both break mid-catalog to Ray Charles = “the starry dynamo.”
6. SOLOMIO & “A Separate Peace” (John Knowles) Prep school cruelty, institutional erasure of trauma. Jeffrey/Finny both cause falls they can’t acknowledge. “The sea just closed up” / the tree, the fall, the silence. Writing: Knowles’s unreliable first-person confession = Nathan’s close third on Jeffrey. Both use restraint—never naming what happened. The violence is in what’s not said. Same withholding creates complicity.
7. ICELAND & “Revolutionary Road” (Richard Yates) Suburban/bourgeois marriage death through self-deception. Philip = Frank Wheeler (complicit in his own cuckolding). Isa’s “três continentes” / April’s abortion plan. Both climax with truth spoken too late. Writing: Yates’s merciless psychological realism = Nathan’s numbered relationships (”quatros”). Both use banal details (squeaking jacket, Revolutionary Hill Estates) to show spiritual death. No escape through prose beauty—deliberately flat.
8. CHARLES ATLAS & “Goodbye, Columbus” (Philip Roth) Jewish narrator watching WASP world, nostalgia disguised as story, longing for unattainable woman. The feather = the Patimkin’s fruit. “Not in a million years” = “I knew it would end badly.” Writing: Roth’s older narrator voice looking back = Nathan’s “sixty years later.” Both use present tense for the memory (immersive) then pull back to comment. The double vision—who I was / who I am—creates the ache.
9. THE KNUCKLEBALL ARTIST & "Holes" (Louis Sachar) Destiny and generational patterns. Stanley cursed by ancestor = Reginald cursed by The Boil's loan. Zero = Phineas (underestimated short kid saves everyone). The matching patterns across time (21 years/generations). Both protagonists digging to break curses. Writing: Sachar's braided timelines (Elya 1800s/Stanley 1990s) = Nathan's 2003/2023 structure mirroring at 4:59 PM June 3rd. Both reveal connections slowly through repetition (the number 21, the song). Simple prose serves emotional depth, not simplicity. Rules matter (Rule 5.09(2)(b) = Camp Green Lake rules). Middle-grade accessible but emotionally sophisticated.
10. LOVE HERMAN WITH A COMMA & “Flowers for Algernon” (Daniel Keyes) Epistolary form tracking consciousness through grammar. Herman’s comma lessons = Charlie’s “progris riports.” Both document unrequited love (Miss Stimson/Miss Kinnian) through evolving syntax. Writing: Keyes’s IQ through punctuation = Nathan’s emotional intelligence through punctuation. “Love Herman with a comma” = the spelling corrections. Both writers trust form to carry emotion. The corrections are the love story, not decoration on it.
11. LINER NOTES & "High Fidelity" (Nick Hornby) Music obsession as emotional avoidance. Rob's top-5 lists = Laszlo's playlist chapters. Both use catalog structure to analyze failed relationships while missing the point entirely. Jazz/vinyl knowledge as armor against intimacy. "Did I listen to music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to music?" = "Attention is love" spoken by the man who won't pay attention. Writing: Hornby's list structure (Top 5 breakups, Top 5 songs) = Nathan's numbered playlist as chapters. Both use first-person narrator who can't see his own failure. The music commentary IS the failure—intellectualizing emotion, curating instead of feeling. Comic but devastating. Sarah's "Coltrane wouldn't have read your book" = Laura's "I haven't thought about you."
12. LUNA & Ovid's "Metamorphoses" Mythological transformation as curse and compulsion. Luna turning wolves to ash "one by one" = Ovid's repeated metamorphoses. Gods/mortals trapped in patterns they can't escape. The daughter of Hestia fleeing through burning forest = Daphne fleeing Apollo, Io transformed. Destruction through divine inheritance. Writing: Ovid's episodic structure with repeated formulas ("one by one the daughter of Hestia raised her hand") = Nathan's incantatory repetition. Both use archaic simplicity—no psychology, just action and consequence. The brevity is the power. Metamorphosis happens in present tense, immediate and inevitable. Mythological voice stripped of modern interiority—characters ARE their actions, their curses, their fates.
What did AI get right? Wrong? Your comments appreciated as always.
I'd need to read/re-read some, in order to do more thinking and leave a meaningful comment
But very interesting. Saving and sharing, thank you, Adam