The book you stopped writing is still a book.
Writers Will reads the manuscript you already have and shows you what is actually on the page — who is telling the story, how each voice is written, and where the thing stands still.
It measures your text against the intent you declared yourself, not against anyone else's idea of a good novel. You write down what you meant. It tells you how far the writing has drifted from it.
It runs on your own computer. Nothing is uploaded. And it never rewrites a word — the difference between what you meant and what you wrote is the work, and the work is yours.
You could feel it was flat. You couldn't point at where.
You got a whole manuscript out of it. Readable, grammatical, nothing obviously wrong. And still every character sounded like the same person, and the harder you steered the less moved. A feeling can't be fixed. A number can.
Eight voices in a manuscript written by hand
- Enzo 24.7 words/sentence · 3.1 % dialogue · 13.7 abstract
- Mats 15.1 words/sentence · 20.0 % dialogue · 11.2 abstract
- Amara 13.3 words/sentence · 0.4 % dialogue · 3.7 abstract
- Yasmin 13.3 words/sentence · 19.4 % dialogue · 8.1 abstract
- Elin 11.6 words/sentence · 12.1 % dialogue · 6.2 abstract
Enzo writes sentences twice as long as Elin's. Amara and Yasmin have the same sentence length to the decimal — and fifty times the difference in dialogue. That is what eight people look like when they can be told apart: the distances between the voices run from twelve to forty-nine per cent.
Run your own manuscript and see where your rows land. If they sit on top of one another, it isn't your imagination — it's flattening, and it shows up in the numbers before you can put it into words.
We are not looking for AI
Writers Will cannot tell who wrote a sentence, and doesn't try. What it measures is uniformity — and uniform prose reads flat no matter who or what produced it. The same measurement catches the writer who gives every character the same mouth.
What you do about it
You write down what each voice is meant to be. Then Writers Will shows you where the text already is that, and where it isn't. It isn't a button. It's an evening — and it's the difference between a manuscript that was generated and one that is yours.
The manuscript stays with you
The measuring happens on your own computer. If you have already handed the book to a model once, you shouldn't have to do it again to find out what is in it.
The numbers above are measured on Samma vatten, the Swedish novel this tool was built out of. Writers Will reads English too — Flesch instead of LIX, English stop words, English number words.
Tell me when it is ready
Writers Will already speaks English. What is missing is the release. Leave your address and you will hear once, when it is there.
One letter, once. Your address is used for that and nothing else, it is never passed on, and it is deleted afterwards. Changed your mind? One line to support@bokbunden.se is enough.
What happens to your address
Writers Will is sold by Molin Wordsmith, a sole trader registered in Sweden (org. no. 19781112-4630), Ramgränd 20, 302 77 Halmstad. That is who holds your data.
Three things are stored: the address, the time, and which language the page was in. Not your IP address, not your country, nothing else. It is used to send one letter when Writers Will is released, and then deleted. The record also expires by itself after 400 days if that letter never goes out.
You can ask to be removed, to see what is stored, or to have it corrected, at any time — write to support@bokbunden.se and it is done the same day. You do not have to say why. If you are unhappy with how it is handled you can complain to the Swedish authority, IMY.
The form runs no JavaScript and sets no cookies. It posts to
konto.bokbunden.se, our own address. No third party
is involved.
Not out yet — but closer than this page looks. The program speaks English already; it has run in Swedish for a while as Bokbunden. What is missing is the English release, not the English measurements.
If you write in English and want to know when it is ready, or if you simply want to ask something, write to support@bokbunden.se. A person reads it.