Kevin D. Hendricks

The Mathematical Conquest of Literature

Over at Faith*In*Fiction Dave Long has been talking about all sorts of statistics for quantifying how a novel is written. Things like Overall Dialogue Percentage (ODP), Literary EKG (LEKG–wait can an acronym include an acronym?) and Protagonist Consciousness Indicator (PCI). While it sounds incredibly boring to the non-book geek, it’s interesting to bring some numbers to the wordy business of books.

Just how much dialogue is in a book, and what does that mean for the reading experience (a quick glance at my novel comes up with 29% ODP)? How quickly paced is the story? And who’s telling the story? It’s easy to get a general feel for these things, but cold hard numbers can tell the real story.

As goofy as this all sounds, I think it’s brilliant. Somewhere out there a grad student needs to be writing their thesis about this, taking the time to figure out all these numbers for all the classic works of literature and giving us some solid numbers and benchmarks to work with. A .300 batting average is pretty good, but what kind of LEKG do the best thrillers have? And are the numbers Long proposes really the best numbers to look at?

It’s about the dorkiest thing I’ve ever heard–but I love it.