A Web-based Application for Writing Novels

In this paper, we propose a method for assisting amateur writers in novel writing. Amateur writers can publish their work intensively through web infrastructures. This situation is beneficial, because it encourages amateur writers to enhance their skills by sharing their work. However, writing a good novel is difficult for a novice, because the novel-writing task requires the management of many character settings and maintenance of consistency throughout the novel. The length of a novel increases the difficulty of the task and decreases motivation owing to cumbersome management tasks. To reduce the burden, we introduce automatic keyword suggestion and highlighting techniques. Automatic keyword suggestion finds names of characters from the draft text and proposes their addition to the character list. The character names in the list are automatically linked to the corresponding words in the draft text. Using such functions, amateur writers can easily check the consistency of their novels while writing, similar to the use of an integrated development environment for software development. We have implemented a web application that provides the functions, and we consider the effectiveness of the proposed method here. c © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of KES International.