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LitLift — A Free Novel-Writing Assistant

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Recently, I’ve taken over leadership of a writing group in my area, and I’ve been meeting a lot of new talented writers in this role.  As part of this, I’ve also met the primary developer of a free novel-writing website called LitLift.

The website is currently in beta, and allows you to intuitively organize books, characters, settings, and items.  LitLift lets you organize your thoughts for your novel while staying out of your way in order to allow you to focus on the business of writing your book.

I’ve been using LitLift to organize my thoughts for my current novel — where I am approximately 25% complete with the first draft.  Having access to my character data from anywhere is a useful feature, especially since I’m not always at home when I have my next idea.  Some of the next planned features will make it even easier to write my story wherever I happen to be.

Since LitLift is in beta, there are new features being added often.  New users will be able to request additional features, and help guide the development of this software so that it’s as useful as possible.  For writers to have this level of influence on new software is a rare opportunity.

Who Do You Write Like?

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Over the past few weeks, several people have pointed me to a brand new site: http://iwl.me

iwl.me — short for “I write like” — is designed to give people an idea of what authors have a similar style to the writing that’s submitted. It uses this through a technique called Bayesian classification.

However, don’t think that you can get a good comparison just by submitting a few sentences or paragraphs.

A Bayesian classifier looks for word and phrase frequency, and to get a good comparison, you’re going to need a longer sample than just a paragraph. If you submit a long enough sample (at least a couple of pages), you’re more likely to get useful feedback.

It’s kind of like a blind person tasting a chef’s salad in a single bite. If you dig in on one side, you might say, “Oh, this tastes like egg and lettuce.” If you dig in on another side, you might say, “No, this tastes like tomatoes, cheese, and lettuce.” If you dig in yet another side, you might say, “this tastes like ham, chicken, and bacon.”

However, if you eat the whole salad, you get a delicious blend of flavors. With just a paragraph, the algorithm is like the blind person taking a small taste of the salad.

Sorry, guys. As I write this, it’s nearly time for lunch. I’m looking forward to it.

I submitted several sample chapters of my novel-in-progress, and received back a fairly consistent result of James Joyce. I’m actually glad that it has a consistent style — it shows that the book at least is internally consistent.

While this can give you some useful feedback, I wouldn’t rely on it as the only source for finding similar authors to your writing voice. While this does look for word choices, sentence structure, and sentence length, it doesn’t take into account genre or topics. Make sure to read some of the author’s work before bragging too much.

And, for the curious, this blog post sounds like Cory Doctorow (likely because he’s a famous blogger). I can live with that.

Interested to find out who you write like? Check out iwl.me!


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