So THIS is the article that has all those writers on Bluesky ranting.

For me, I don’t see HOW this is a useful tool at all. It’s… a word counter. It counts the number of times you use a word. Someone had a screencap of his “vividness” rankings on words, and it had placed “wintery” at a higher score than “permafrost.” Why? How does it know that one word is more vivid than the other? what’s the standard here? This sort of thing is very subjective.

And he starts with Vonnegut’s shape of stories, but an LLM can’t recognize rising and falling action so how could it do such a comparison?

Honestly, the WHOLE thing sounds like he’s trying to create a formula for good writing, and you can’t pin down good writing like that.

This is not a useful tool. It’s a tool that will get people caught in the weeds like they do with narrative outlines like the Hero’s Journey and lists of tropes. It will churn out a bunch of writers people don’t like who can’t understand why they don’t catch on when they are following all the rules.