Friday 21 March 2014

Science Finds Secret Of Writing A Bestseller

I have a folder on my desktop titled 'story ideas' and inside it is a notepad file that contains paragraphs of story ideas that i plan to get around to writing one day but find the idea of actually writing them too daunting to begin.
What i need is to hand the ideas to someone and they do the months of writing and editing and proof reading but i still get the royalty cheques and get to turn up at the Man Booker award ceremony to thank my agent and give no thanks whatsoever to God who wouldn't have helped me in any way.  
As i have yet to receive any offers from aspiring novelists to write my story for me, what would be nice is for some software genius to write a program where you fill in a few prompts and it that writes the story for you but as yet that hasn't hit the shelves of PC World but science has found the secrets of how to write a best selling novel.
Scientists have developed an algorithm called statistical stylometry which can analyse a book and predict with 84% accuracy whether or not it will be a success.
A group of computer scientists from Stony Brook University in New York said that a range of factors determine whether or not a book will enjoy success, including interestingness, novelty, style of writing, and how engaging the storyline is.  
They analysed over 800 classic books and found that several trends were often found in the most successful books, including heavy use of conjunctions such as 'and' and 'but' and a large numbers of nouns and adjectives.
Less successful work tended to include more verbs and adverbs and made heavy use of words such as 'wanted', 'took' and 'promised'.
Sounds easy but if you have a potential novel with a storyline concerning a person who wants to take peoples promises you may want to rethink it.

4 comments:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lucy said...

It was a jokey entry into a post about software writing a novel. I see Santa didn't bring you a sense of humour this year then. Maybe you will get it for your birthday.

Anonymous said...

I thought my comment was hilarious

Q

Lucy said...

Don't give up the day job q