Here’s how the police sketch program portrayed the three characters I mentioned above, along with the passages that generated them. (All images via The Composites.)

Humbert Humbert, from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov:

Gloomy good looks…Clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice…broad shoulder…I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case…But instead I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows…A cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile…aging ape eyes…Humbert’s face might twitch with neuralgia.

Emma Bovary, from Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert:

She was pale all over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils, her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three grey hairs on her temples, she talked much of her old age…Her eyelids seemed chiseled expressly for her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black down.

The Misfit, from “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” by Flannery O’Connor

He was an older man than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look. He had a long creased face and didn’t have on any shirt or undershirt. He had on blue jeans that were too tight for him and was holding a black hat and a gun…“You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!”… When he smiled he showed a row of strong white teeth…Hunching his shoulders slightly…The Misfit’s eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking.

What do you think? Do these sketches match up with how you’d visualized these characters?

By the way, the site is accepting suggestions for characters. Who would you like to see sketched up?

• Fiction from the Spam box
• Can an online tool calculate how “fit” or “flabby” your prose is?
• Could robots ever write novels?

So a monkey typing into infinity will eventually produce Shakespeare—or so the theory goes. Maybe robots would be faster?

The New York Times recently discussed the phenomenon of robots writing books. After an encounter with a robo-writer called Lambert M. Surhone—literally a computer churning out titles like “Saltine Cracker” and “Pagan Kennedy” from pasted-together online text—author Pagan Kennedy (yes) was fascinated and preplexed:

Could robots ever be trusted to write original novels, histories, scientific papers and sonnets? For years, artificial-intelligence experts have insisted that machines can succeed as authors. But would we humans ever want to read the robot-books?

Mechanized storytelling is hardly a new idea for the internet age. The blog Brain Pickings explains that nearly a century ago, people were already trying to mechanize the art of narration:

In 1894, French critic Georges Polti recognized thirty-six possible plots, which included conflicts such as Supplication, Pursuit, Self-sacrifice, Adultery, Revolt, the Enigma, Abduction, and Disaster. In 1928, dime novelist William Wallace Cook, author of Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots, did him one better, cataloging every narrative he could think of through a method that bordered on madness. His final plot count? 1,462.

Plotto, reissued last month by Tin House, was a manual that aimed to mechanize the entire narrative trade. In his introduction, Paul Collins recognizes that Cook was something of a plot machine himself, once writing fifty-four novels in a year, more than one a week. Cook’s methods were developed into a Plotto Studio of Authorship in New York City, his book hailed as “an invention which reduces literature to an exact science.”

While still a young director in England, Alfred Hitchcock requested the book from America, and the creator of the courtroom drama Perry Mason claimed he had learned a great deal from it.

Here’s a sample entry from Plotto:

9b. B’s cattle ranch was left to her by her father, and every man B hires as foreman makes love to her sooner or later, and is discharged. B hires A as a foreman on her ranch, and he promises to keep his place and not to make love to her, but B falls in love with him, and it present glad to learn that A’s sole purpose in taking the job of foreman was to win her love.”

Like Lambert Surhone, Plotto and the other story-writing machines may seem mindless and formulaic. But in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kenneth Goldsmith argues the opposite may be true. He teaches a class at at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative Writing,” in which students “are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing”—just the kind of work Lambert Surhone does. Goldsmith readily acknowledges the pitfalls of this kind of writing, but done properly, he suggests, it might help revitalize literature:

I’m not saying that such writing should be discarded: Who hasn’t been moved by a great memoir? But I’m sensing that literature—infinite in its potential of ranges and expressions—is in a rut, tending to hit the same note again and again, confining itself to the narrowest of spectrums, resulting in a practice that has fallen out of step and is unable to take part in arguably the most vital and exciting cultural discourses of our time. I find this to be a profoundly sad moment—and a great lost opportunity for literary creativity to revitalize itself in ways it hasn’t imagined. [...]

After a semester of my forcibly suppressing a student’s “creativity” by making her plagiarize and transcribe, she will tell me how disappointed she was because, in fact, what we had accomplished was not uncreative at all; by not being “creative,” she had produced the most creative body of work in her life. By taking an opposite approach to creativity—the most trite, overused, and ill-defined concept in a writer’s training—she had emerged renewed and rejuvenated, on fire and in love again with writing.

Goldsmith’s essay is fascinating and well worth a read in its entirety. And tell us: What do you make of robot writing? If humans create literature by “repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing,” are they any different from robot “writers” like Lambert Surhone? Or are they, as Goldsmith suggests, possibly the way of the future?

• Repurposing spam as poems—or fiction.

You probably know what a CAPTCHA is, even if you didn’t know its name. Those warped words that you sometimes have to type out? That’s a CAPTCHA. Websites use them to prevent spambots from posting (spam) comments. Humans can read CAPTCHAs very easily. Robots, not so much.

But did you know that although CAPTCHAs seem like gibberish, they actually help preserve and create literature?

Some CAPTCHAs actually help digitize books and magazines: the reCAPTCHA system uses scanned words from old books. Every time a user like you types in the word, it helps the system decipher old books. Explains the reCAPTCHA site:

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

CAPTCHAs have even inspired literature of their own. Some sites use two CAPTCHAs side-by-side, and reading them, I find myself making up a sentence or story. Apparently I’m not the only one. At imgur, one user posted a fantasy comic inspired by the random phrases, via GalleyCat:

via imgur

It’s proof, I suppose, that writers see stories in everything.

(Oh, and if you were wondering? CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Bust that factoid out at your Superbowl party!)

• More fiction from an unexpected online place: the spam box

Here’s my one tiny complaint about Gmail: it may be a little too good at filtering out the spam. I used to get tremendous joy (uh, no pun intended) out of the badly-phrased, ill-translated, nonsensical requests offering me “Turbines for your meat jet” or the opportunity to become a crude oil dealer.

Thank goodness for the Spam Poetry Institute, which describes its mission thusly:

The Spam Poetry Institute is an organization dedicated to collecting and preserving the fine literature created by the world’s spammers. Not only do these persistent individuals sell useful products like cable filters and international drivers’ licenses, they also know how to combine words in a very powerful way.

We hope that you will browse our collection of special messages and that you will be as touched as we were when we first found these gems of imaginative composition.

Oh, and what gems they are! Here is one of my favorites:

Untitled

by dghnfgj

If you are looking wow power leveling,
buy warcraft gold as well as WOW
Power Leveling and World Of wow leveling
When you need someone to listen,FFXI Gil, I’ll be there.
When you need a hug, cheap FFXI Gil,I’ll be there.
When you need someone to hold your hand, I’ll be there.
When you need someone to wipe your tears, guess what?
I’ll be there.
William Shakespeare

(William Shatner, please call me. I think I’ve found your next performance piece.)

Spam emails are often created by programs called Markov text generators. Basically, such programs start with a source text, chop it into pieces, and reassemble, creating works that sound almost like poems. I’ve seen writing exercises that ask you to do something similar, which made me wonder: what would a spam story look like?

There are lots of Markov text generators online, so I popped two paragraphs of a recent Margaret Atwood story from the New Yorker into one. The fourth and fifth paragraphs of the original text produced this spam-ified version:

It’s the Caribbean. Her face is one off, if only to Aquacize, and low on her purposes; she avoids eye contact with them. The ones who cherish the Arctic over, say, the solitaries, who interest her—the Arctic over, say, the belief that she chooses her left breast. Thanks to demonstrate to herself that she’ll do anything about it, she tells herself, but there’s life in a little bronzer and glimmer powder and, low on her best that she’ll do anything about it, she chooses her game. Not that there’s life in excellent shape for any age, at least when fully clothed and low lighting, she tells herself, but there’s life in excellent shape for her cream-colored pullover, perching the solitaries who cherish the lurkers at least when fully clothed, and core strength training, she’s still in a little bronzer and low on her purposes; she can finesse ten years.

It’s the Magnetic Northward nametag, just slightly too old for selecting the lurkers at this stage: with a bikini—superficial puckering has set in, despite her game. Not that she can; still in the best that there’s life in the Magnetic Northward nametag just slightly too old dog yet.

Despite its randomness, there’s a certain poetry here, too. The insistent repetition of “that she’ll do anything about it” and “there’s life in” gives the piece a rhythm and the sense of a desperately ruminating woman of a certain age. And some of those phrases turn out quite striking: “there’s life in a little bronzer and glimmer powder” suggests one kind of attitude towards aging, while “superficial puckering has set in, despite her game” undercuts the ruse. A little editing, and this might turn into a moving little piece.

By the way, if this spam-fiction reminds you of the the so-hot-right-now Twitter feed @Horse_ebooks, you are not crazy. @Horse_ebooks isn’t a parody site, though it reads like one: it’s a spam bot. Splitsider says it “might be the best Twitter account that has ever existed.” Oh, and it has over 28,000 followers.

Might spam fiction have a future? The Tumblr blog horse_ebooks fanfics thinks so: it’s devoted to (yup) fanfiction based on the spam account’s tweets.

Image: LiveScribe

Doesn’t that sound like magic?

Well, we live in magical times. Smartpens, as they’re called, are a reality and are available for around $100. The New York Times gives the lowdown on one, the LiveScribe Echo, and more have come to market lately as well. Plus, the pens and their programs can help you organize your notes, too. According to the product description, the Echo “saves your notes and recordings to your computer for fast, easy access to what’s important. Search for words within your notes and find what you need fast.” Of course they make great gifts for students, but they’d also be useful for writers embroiled in research, no? And get this: it can even “convert your handwritten notes into digital text”–a huge boon for those who prefer to draft longhand.

The LiveScribe Echo and other smartpens are available through LiveScribe’s website and at many other retailers. And check back here at the FWR blog over the next two days for our last Bookish Gift Ideas of 2010. Who knows–you might find a little something for yourself as well.

Image: ThinkGeek.com

I think this dawned on me when I got a smartphone shortly after my son was born. Suddenly, despite having a babe (literally) in arms, I could still read my favorite blogs and newspapers. I could still get my email. I could even read books and spent an entire month working my way through the complete Sherlock Holmes—in fifteen-minute segments, during my son’s naps.

But the one thing a smartphone isn’t very good for is actually writing. Sure, you can take notes or jot down a sentence when a great one occurs to you. If you’re good at thinking aloud, you can dictate to yourself. But I need to see the words on the page—or screen, as the case may be—and I compose at the keyboard because I can’t write fast enough with pen and ink. So if I go out to write, I still need to lug along my laptop.

Enter the Cube Laser Virtual Keyboard, which looks like something from Tron. It’s a small metallic box that connects to your smartphone—wirelessly, of course—and projects a laser keyboard onto any flat surface. That’s right. You type on a VIRTUAL LASER KEYBOARD. And it even makes keyboard sounds for you.

Here’s a video of it in action:

I could say more, but what else do you really need to know? VIRTUAL LASER KEYBOARD. Full information, and the keyboard itself, are available at ThinkGeek.

And check back here at the FWR blog every day in December for another bookish gift idea!

We’ve talked before about ways to get yourself to write. There are tools to help minimize distractions, and even tools like Write or Die that dole out punishment if you don’t keep the words flowing. But what is all you need is some positive motivation?

That’s where Written? Kitten! enters the picture. Written? Kitten! is a free web-based writing tool. And yeah, the punctuation there is correct. As you type, the site periodically rewards you with… wait for it… a picture of a cute kitten. You choose your level of feline reward—every 100, 200, 500, or 1000 words. Perfect for those of us who work better with positive reinforcement.

Why kittens? Why not kittens? Actually, cats may be more helpful to the writing process than you might think. Here’s the famously prolific Muriel Spark’s advice on upping your production:

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work, I explained, the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp. The light from a lamp, I explained, gives a cat great satisfaction. The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.

Image: society6

Gift-giving season is upon us–and this year, Fiction Writers Review comes to the rescue, offering a bookish gift (that’s not a book) every day in December.

Protect and beautify your iPhone—and show your love of books—with this Penguin Books iPhone case. I love the slightly faded, antique look of the covers—such a contrast from the sleek, futuristic iPhone beneath.

Available from society6.com. And check back every day in December for another bookish gift idea from FWR!

Is your writing lean and trim? Or does it need to shed some flab? Recently, user Leigh posted on FWR’s Facebook wall about an interesting writing-analysis tool, WritersDiet. Intrigued, I clicked on over. WritersDiet is a free online tool that analyzes a sample of your text. Paste in any text you want, hit “Run the test,” and the site provides an overall “fitness” report and a bar graph showing your usage of verbs, nouns, prepositions, adjectives/adverbs, and it/this/that/there. Here’s how it scored a few different samples:

1. The opening paragraphs of a front-page story from the New York Times:

The results: the New York Times article “needed toning,” rating “flabby” in its verb usage.

2.  Classic literature: Great Expectations and Pride and Prejudice

To my surprise, the beginning of Great Expectations ranks “lean and trim” (view the graph), but the first few paragraphs of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice didn’t fare so well–oh dear.

3. Contemporary fiction: George Saunders and Jonathan Franzen

What about contemporary literature? I popped in this passage from George Saunders’ recent New Yorker story “Tenth of December“:

The pale boy with unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs and cublike mannerisms hulked to the mudroom closet and requisitioned Dad’s white coat. Then requisitioned the boots he’d spray-painted white. Painting the pellet gun white had been a no. That was a gift from Aunt Chloe. Every time she came over he had to haul it out so she could make a big stink about the woodgrain.
Today’s assignation: walk to pond, ascertain beaver dam. Likely he would be detained. By that species that lived amongst the old rock wall. They were small but, upon emerging, assumed certain proportions. And gave chase. This was just their methodology. His aplomb threw them loops. He knew that. And revelled it. He would turn, level the pellet gun, intone: Are you aware of the usage of this human implement?

Alas, poor George came out as “flabby.”

But how about the opening to Jonathan Franzen’s much-touted Freedom? Fit and trim—view the graph here!

4. Your humble wannabe novelist

And last, at great risk to my own ego, I pasted in the opening to the latest draft of my novel. The verdict, to my great delight: “lean,” the leanest of any of the samples I’d tested.

So…?
What does all of this tell us? Nothing—though I appreciated the affirmation. Says the WritersDiet FAQ:

Q. Can effective writing really be reduced to a numerical formula?

A. No, of course not. The WritersDiet Test does not attempt to measure for vividness of expression, clarity of thought, fluidity of style, or any of the other elements that matter most in engaging writing. The test does, however, provide a user-friendly method for identifying some of the sentence-level grammatical features that most frequently weigh down academic prose.

Q. I ran the WritersDiet Test on a passage by my favorite author, and it came out “flabby.” Doesn’t this mean your test is flawed?

A. I developed the test to help stodgy academic writers write more clearly and energetically. Many fabulous pieces of prose will receive scores of “flabby” or even “heart attack” on the test, because stylish writers have the confidence and skill to play around with language in ways that the WritersDiet Test is not designed, and therefore should not be expected, to evaluate.

But what the WritersDiet Test can help you with is identifying patterns in your writing. It can show you, in color-coded form, whether you use lots of adverbs or prepositions. It will highlight every “it,” “this,” “that,” and “there” in your sample text. Then you can decide what—if anything—to do about it.

• In his Quotes & Notes column, Steven Wingate discusses when to cut—and more important, when to be cautious.
• A true story about why prepositions matter—and why having too many might make your prose weaker.
• Want to learn to write a good sentence? Stanley Fish has some advice.

Nick Carraway and Gatsby (Jay)
Are next-door neighbors; every day
The enigmatic Gatsby gazes
Towards a distant green light (Daisy’s).

Cute, right? But it seems some people took the book at face value, expecting to catch up on the Western canon in just a few hours. Says one review of the book on Goodreads:

I had to give up on this one. It’s meant to be brief synopses of classics, so you supposedly don’t have to read the books yourself, but they really only make sense if you’ve already read the books.

She’s right about that–like most parodies, the poems are much funnier if you know the originals–but she’s also not alone. Since time immemorial, people have been trying to figure out how to “read” books without, you know, actually reading them.

Recently, a new startup called Wibbitz claims it can convert any text to video. Explains Social Times:

With Wibbitz you’ll never have to read again—you can surf over to any webpage, click the play button and be served up with a 60-second video summarizing everything you need to know about what’s on that page.

In an interview with Beet.TV, Wibbitz CEO and Co-Founder Zohar Dayan says, “Basically, we analyze the text, we create a summary out of it, we only extract the most important parts of it, we analyze it and bring the most relevant images and video clips from around the web and convert all the text to voice. So basically what we come up with is a cool, interactive video that you can just lean back, hit play and watch.”

You can see a demo of Wibbitz in action here. I’d love to see how this tool would do with a passage from a novel–I can only imagine, say, an Alice Munro story summarized into its “most important parts” and illustrated with “the most relevant images and video clips.” (The New Yorker’s “abstracts” of its fiction are almost uniformly hilarious already. Don’t believe me? Read this one, of Lorrie Moore’s “You’re Ugly, Too,” and tell me I’m wrong.)

Anyway, some in the publishing industry are alreay concerned about Wibbitz’s effect on literature. GalleyCat muses,

It may take a few years, but this technology has some scary implication for readers and writers. Will unprofitable activities like reading and writing ultimately be threatened by the Internet?

Maybe I should get all up in arms about this, but mostly, these “summaries” of literature are just… funny. Take the Book-A-Minute website, which condenses books into rather cynical works that will take you far less than a minute to read. (Via.) Here’s their version of Gatsby:

Gatsby: “Daisy, I made all this money for you, because I love you.”

Daisy: “I cannot reciprocate, because I represent the American Dream.”

Gatsby: “Now I must die, because I also represent the American Dream.”

(Gatsby DIES)

Nick: I hate New Yorkers.

THE END

And here’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner“–technically not a book, but we’ll let it slide, because it lets us have this:

Ancient Mariner: I am creepy and old. Listen to me.
Wedding Guest: I’m late, but I’ll listen.
Ancient Mariner: I killed an albatross. Then everyone died.
THE END

Though it purports to be serious–”We’ve taken all kinds of great works of literature and boiled them down to their essence, extracting all the filler (and believe me, there’s a lot of it sometimes). In just one minute, you can read entire books and learn everything your teachers will expect you to know.”–Book-a-Minute is clearly intended as humor.

In fact, it’s hard for me to imagine summaries of literature that wouldn’t be funny, intentionally or not. After all, one of the main features of good literature is that how it says things is just as important–perhaps even more important–than what it says. The text and the meaning can’t be separated from each other. In other words, condensed will never be as good as the real thing.

But maybe I”m missing something. What do you think? Do summaries like those by Wibbitz pose a threat to writing, reading, and publishing?