The Story of John

[jeffbinder]

My novel will tell the story of John—that is, the story of every character named John in the Wright American Fiction corpus, merged into one person.

[sshine]

That reminds me of the mini-RPG called Everyone is John based on the film Being John Malkovich. Quite enjoyable but very confusing game. A variation of your strategy is the story of all characters John Malkovich ever played, merged into one person.

[smythp]

Feeling like this will be a long story.
Feeling like this will be a long story.

[jeffbinder]

Okay, I finally got around to doing this. I pulled out every sentence containing the proper name John according to the semantic annotations and mixed them together into a single text, ordered according to their relative position within the book they were taken from. I also took the liberty of standardizing John's last name to "Arbuckle."

Voila!

It turned out to be 95,223 words including the chapter headings - not quite as long as I expected, but long enough to complete the challenge!

One thing that's interesting is how the beginning and end turned out. You can pretty easily tell which sentences are the first or last of their respective novels, even with the capitalized first words aside.

The code is on GitHub here.