Your Writing Style,
Mapped

Like Nin, you treat your journal not as a private dumping ground but as a literary form in itself. The act of returning to entries across years, curating them for a reader, mirrors Nin's lifelong project. You share her willingness to be vulnerable and specific — football games, Capoeira, darkroom hours — rather than reaching for grand abstraction.

Alderton blends sharp observation with genuine emotional honesty — exactly what you do. Your football entries ("football is the new clubbing") have that same deadpan quality. Both of you anchor big cultural moments in deeply personal experience, making the private feel universally relatable.

Your Brixton rebrand post — and broader interest in cities, class, and community — channels Orwell's documentary instinct. You write about London the way he wrote about England: from the inside, with a sharp but unsentimental affection, and without literary vanity.

You've read Lispector — and it shows in spirit, if not always in style. Your entries shift register quickly: from recipe to elegy to music criticism. That restless, associative movement is very much in the crônica tradition Lispector exemplified. Your Brazilian roots give you access to an emotional register that British writing often keeps at arm's length.

You started reading him at 13 — and some of that early imprint survives. The refusal to romanticise corporate work ("corporate world drudgery"), the unflinching take on everyday life, the willingness to write about boredom and ambivalence as freely as joy: that's Bukowski-adjacent, even when your tone is warmer than his.

You cite her explicitly as your origin myth. While your circumstances are joyfully different, you share Frank's commitment to the diary as a record of *a life in motion* — not tidied up for posterity, but honest and present-tense. Starting at 12, in Portuguese, you were already doing exactly what she taught you.