How to Use a Computer Program to Write a Novel

I have a few stories coming out in the coming weeks and months, but in the meantime I’ve been keeping busy with my human enhancement theory for using computer algorithms to write books.  I asked in my last post, “Why not?”  It’s a good question, so I’m taking my own counsel.  This will unfortunately be kept largely abstract, since I’ll be using a pen name and don’t care to reveal it here, but I’d like to provide some concrete numbers to go along with my hypothetical work-in-progress.

So I was able to follow my general plan for generating text from public domain works based on selecting sentences that contain certain keywords and then “rewriting” those sentences by automatically replacing nouns, verbs, and adjectives with synonyms.  However, rather than generating the text on a paragraph by paragraph basis depending on the specific idea I wanted to capture in each paragraph, I found it just as effective and less time consuming to let the text in a paragraph determine the keyword for the next paragraph, going on in a long chain of connected thoughts.  So I start the program with a keyword, but then the program selects a keyword from the paragraph generated by the original keyword to generate the next paragraph, from which another keyword is selected, and so on.  So the technical part is done, and performs pretty well as far as my expectations were concerned.  In its current state, the program generates about 15,000 words an hour.

Of course, a lot of this is incoherent, fraught with typos, and makes reference to characters and settings that have nothing to do with the story I’d like to tell.  So the hardest part has been the rewrite, as was expected.  I’m about a fourth of the way through the text right now (toward a goal of 50,000 words), and I’m going at a pace of about 2,000 words per hour.  At this rate it should take me about 25 hours to finish, which is longer than I’d expected, but still half the time it would take me writing normally (at 1,000 words per hour).  And that’s without counting all the editing I’m getting done as I go.

So far I’m enjoying the process of figuring out who the characters are, what their conflicts are, and then seeing what happens to them and what surprises pop up along the way.  It’s stretching me creatively as I go, straining to make connections between the otherwise unrelated snippets of text, incidentally a uniquely human feat as I pointed out in my last post and also came across in a recent article.  So again, computers can go a long way toward helping us as humans, but as for exercising the creativity to write the book itself – that’s more of a stretch.  The real question is whether using a computer in this human enhancing way results in books that anyone wants to read.  All I can say for now is that I think it’s great, so we’ll see if anyone else feels the same way.  I’m planning to publish it on Amazon by the end of December.