Zirdland.com is ready.
We're going to launch with a party - a competition. Dual competitions, actually. One for novelists, one for screenwriters. It starts on 08/08/08 - and will be sort of a Literary Olympic event. This may be the only writing contest that is judged solely by a machine.
The Arc Angel program scans a literary work, establishes character significance, tracks emotional conflict, story arcs, dramatic resonance, and provides a synopsis and editorial advice. It highlights flat spots in the plot-line, points out sentence groups, paragraphs or whole pages that fall short of advancing the story, and then scores the work against published works - classic and popular - comparing writing styles with established authors.
The Arc Angel can accurately pick a bestseller from the crowd. Writers will get to see a visual representation of their story structure, and publishers will be able to process their slush pile through the program and sift out properties with market potential.
It's a fascinating adventure. Writers who attended our focus group last month agreed that the Arc Angel is a powerful tool to get a look at the sub-text of a manuscript - to "x-ray" the plot structure and character development, and display the underlying genetic code - the literary-DNA in a novel or script. It's a lot of fun to use, and we can't wait to start processing some manuscripts through it. Thus, the dual competitions...
Basically, the prize is $1,000 for the best novel and $1,000 for the best screenplay - again, judged solely by the Arc Angel. We'll post competition standings on ZirdNEWS.com, as well as excerpts from the winning manuscript.
We hope this will be a fun way to introduce the Zirdland Arc Angel writer's tool, as well as other useful tools that we'll roll-out toward the end of the year.
We're just a few days away...so, keep watching: zirdland.com
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5 comments:
Well, this is ...
...
... interesting!
I've got both a curious grin and a skeptical eyebrow for you.
Did you beta-test with the "greats" and "best-sellers" of literature? Dickens, Melville, Flaubert, Twain, Toni Morrison, "Gone With the Wind"? How would Gertrude Stein and James Joyce fare? What would the program say about Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five"? Or Christopher Nolan's script for "Memento"? Or some of Faulkner's novels?
Can a program really assess the effect reading has on the human psyche?
I can definitely see how it would be a good basic tool for mainstream publishers who just want to winnow the slush pile. And it would be a good basic tool for writers to get cold data about their patterns of diction. Sort of like going through a bank statement with a highlighter pen to define your spending habits.
Then, like with a bank statement, a writer can go back and really think through those habits and word choices.
A publisher may use the scores to choose a closer look at a ms. that scores way high on characters and setting but low on plot.
But would it raise and strengthen the wall between "convenional" and "independent" culture? Would it be a focus group without the humanity? Surely a program can deliver data and statistics, from which a human can make further decisions, but can a program really give advice about quality? Or theme, or poetics, or innovation, or the alchemy that transforms a heart?
I'll enter my novel, and what the heck, a screenplay, just to see what happens.
As we say in critique group, Congratulations on finishing the damn thing!
intriguing for certain; i'll direct my blog readers here. like the previous commenter states: curious & skeptical...but it sounds fun, too:) good luck.
Thanks for the votes of confidence! It's been a long development project, and we may never "perfect" the analysis tools, but they sure seem to point out some amazing things about the works we've run through. We naturally ran our own writing through it (and were humbled), and we have run the great works as well as about 100 of the "bestsellers" for the past couple years. We'll publish those results soon.
We hope the industry can make use of this to shorten the acquisition cycle, and make it easier to bring more great works to market, instead of having to pour an inordinate amount of resources into just a few titles in order to make back the ridiculous amounts being spent at agent-sponsored auctions. Not that we're adverse to getting ridiculously huge advances...
We'll keep our hopes high that this initial novel competition will prove-out the program.
Hey, I think it's a fun and exciting thing you're doing, I'm going to play too. Life is so very short to boo something that might just work for the poor slush pile reader. Congrats and I'll post you on my blo too.
Thanks, Peggy. Just wait until you see what's coming. The recent Novel Competition gave us an opportunity to calibrate the Arc Angel and run it through its paces. A similar competition for scriptwriters is coming up...and that will allow us to tweak the system for that format and then we should be ready to roll it out for general use by our members. Hope you'll stick around...the best is yet to come.
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