A friend sent me a link to a really interesting news item back in Baltimore’s City Paper. It seems that there’s a fellow in Pikesville, Maryland named Chris Yavelow who scanned 210 best selling novels, and created a computer program to analyze them for stylistic tendencies.

His software is called FictionFixer and it was built originally for him to analyze his own novel as compared to these best-sellers, hoping to divine some kind of fixes to make his own novel more saleable. In a sort of broad way, the program “reads” your fiction, and tells you what you need to change in order to make it “better.” It will tell you to change words, add in more descriptive elements, or even introduce characters at different points in your manuscript.

According to the article:

Yavelow says he knows no computer program can write a novel—not yet, anyway. And his invention isn’t supposed to homogenize the industry—“then we’d all write Harry Potter over and over again with different names and places.” No, FictionFixer is meant as a tool, something to define the boundaries of the salable novel for the serious, profit-minded writer—much the way music producers like Quincy Jones and Phil Spector honed pop-music acts to fit within the bounds of the popular sound.

I’m not sure what planet this guy is on, but we DO have Harry Potter over and over again, and we DO have a completely homogenized publishing industry, thanks to profit-minded writers and companies who bend all their work to exist within a saleable format. So in one sense, his software seems obsolete. Or rather, his mentality seems obsolete, and his application is probably dead on. It’s very likely that publishing companies and editors etc would at some point in the future (or right now, who knows!) to analyze material sent to them from the unsolicited “slush-pile”, to look for diamonds in the rough.

Even more interesting than that though are the extrapolative uses of such a software system. Imagine instead of a fictional novel, you inserted the text of your life story into an advance piece of software like this. If done correctly, it would be able to analyze your life (or at least how you describe it), and spit out a list of recommendations on what you need to change to fit an idealized pattern. Or, even better - imagine some kind of social engineer or government big-whigs sitting down with a program like this to chart the course of world affairs.

“Let’s see… protagonist name… ‘George W. Bush’. Antagonist name: ‘Osama Bin Laden.’ Let me pick out the type of plot devices we want to use… and presto!”

Sounds far-fetched? Maybe it is. But maybe there really is some kind of real or imagined idealized manuscript, or perfect plot line, which things in real life are modelled against. Maybe there is - or will be - some kind of machine that will be able to take the guesswork out of the complexities of life, and boil it down into a simple formula to follow step-by-step for guaranteed success. With the development of artificial intelligences and immersive virtual realities, this may not be so far off after all.