Objective Projection Tools: What Six Free Writing Tools Do and How to Use Them

Some decisions in a scene can be counted: does the name of an emotion appear in the text, is there a simile, how long are the sentences. Others cannot: how close does the narrator stand to the character, is the first sentence of the opening an event or backstory. The Objective Projection Tools were built around this difference. What can be counted, the tool counts; what cannot, the writer marks and the tool only displays.

The six tools at a glance

The tools page: everything in one place

All six tools are reached from the Objective Projection Tools page, which gives a short description of each and the site's latest articles. Each tool has a TR and EN switch at the top; the tools work with English and Turkish text. No account, email or download is needed.

1. Scene Checker

The two constitutional rules of Objective Projection are the Emotion Embargo and the Exclusion of Similes. The Scene Checker scans for these two rules: it marks words that name an emotion directly in red and similes in yellow, and can optionally show evaluative words such as "beautiful" or "wonderful". We pasted the two examples below into the tool:

Selin was terrified. The hallway stretched on as if it would never end.

In these two sentences the tool gave two flags: one emotion label and one simile.

Selin got the key into the lock on the third try. At the end of the hallway the bulb flickered.

In the second example the count is zero.

The tool is dictionary-based; it does not read context. It can flag an ambiguous word such as "tense" wrongly. A character saying "I'm scared" in dialogue is not a fault either; as our articles on dialogue tags and Jane Austen's irony explain, naming an emotion is sometimes a deliberate choice. A flag is not a verdict.

Try the Scene Checker →

2. Text Analyzer

The Text Analyzer shows the countable features of a text: word, character, sentence and paragraph counts; reading time; average sentence length; a distribution that sorts sentences into short (8 words or fewer), medium (9–20) and long (21 or more); the sequence of sentence lengths in the text; the share of words in dialogue; the most frequent words and repeated phrases.

So that it does not fall artificially as a text gets longer, lexical diversity is computed as the average over moving 50-word windows (Covington and McFall 2010). Turkish suffixes turn one word into many forms, so values for Turkish and English texts cannot be compared with each other.

This tool does not check the rules of the Bulut Doctrine and gives no readability score. A short or long sentence is not a fault in itself; the tool only shows how the rhythm is distributed.

Try the Text Analyzer →

3. Iceberg Tool

By Hemingway's iceberg principle, a writer leaves part of what they know off the page; the unseen part carries the seen part. Our article on subtext and the iceberg theory explains the principle in detail. The Iceberg Tool turns it into a worksheet. Two things are written on each row:

• Below the surface: Kerem can't tell his wife he has lost his job.
• Above the surface: At dinner Kerem sliced the bread twice and rested the knife on the edge of his plate.

The tool sets the two columns side by side and looks for three things above the surface: the name of an emotion, a simile, and a word from below the surface coming up unchanged. The tool does not find the subtext; the writer decides it. The table can be printed or copied as text.

Try the Iceberg Tool →

4. Micro Focus Tracker

The Micro Focus Tracker takes its name from the Micro Focus working rule of the Bulut Doctrine: both draw the reader's attention to a small, concrete detail. The tracker keeps the details you plant in a story and their later payoffs in one list; it can be thought of as a workbook for the Chekhov's gun principle.

For each detail you enter where it first appears, its payoff and where the payoff comes; each detail is classed as "with a payoff", "misleading" or "atmosphere". The tracker draws attention to details with no payoff yet and to details whose payoff appears before the set-up. It does not say "cut"; it asks a question: not every detail needs a payoff.

The tracker does not check the Micro Focus rule; it only organises what you enter.

Try the Micro Focus Tracker →

5. Narrative Distance Tool

Narrative distance is how close the narrator stands to the character. The Narrative Distance Tool splits the text into sentences; the writer gives each sentence a distance from 1 (farthest) to 5 (closest). The tool draws these marks as a line and flags sudden jumps of two steps or more. The scale is adapted from John Gardner's idea of psychic distance; the step descriptions are specific to the tool.

The tool does not estimate the distance itself. The reason is given below, under Limitations.

Try the Narrative Distance Tool →

6. Story Opening Tool

The question of where to start a story has a concrete counterpart in the writer's hands: after how many words does the reader reach the first event? The Story Opening Tool separates the first 5, 8, 12 or 20 sentences of an opening; the writer marks each sentence as event, backstory, description or dialogue. The tool shows the order as a coloured strip and states which sentence the first event is and how many words the reader reads before reaching it.

Starting late is not an error; some stories open with description or backstory and do so on purpose.

Try the Story Opening Tool →

Where does your text stay?

All six tools run only in your browser. The text you paste or type is never sent to a server and never stored; it is gone when you close the page. The tools use no cookies and need no account.

About the author

Levent Bulut is a former journalist, author and independent researcher, and the founder of the Objective Projection method. He developed Objective Projection as a narrative engineering methodology within the Bulut Doctrine, which includes the framework of the physics of literature: a way of encoding emotion in physical detail that can be seen and heard rather than naming it. The framework uses the language of classical physics as a planning analogy; its parameters are not measurements of the reader's body. He has published six print books and four free e-books. The method's rules, dataset and reliability studies are openly published.

What the doctrine cannot say here

• The tools do not say whether a text is good or bad. What they show is countable features or the writer's own marks.
• A scene that receives no flags does not mean the emotion reaches the reader; only readers can tell you that.
• The Emotion Embargo is not defended as a universal rule. In dialogue, irony or a first-person unreliable narrator, naming an emotion can be a deliberate choice.
• The tools check none of the four working rules (Materialised Metaphors, Micro Focus, Temporal Anchor, Atmospheric Contradiction) automatically.

Limitations

In the Bulut Doctrine's reliability study (Bulut 2026), a rule-based detector was compared with an independent human rater. For materialised metaphor, agreement between the two raters was κ = 0.015.

Interpretation: For a feature that needs context, the output of a rule-based scan cannot stand in for human judgement; the study leaves open whether this comes from the difficulty of the feature or from the rule's definition not yet being operational enough. This is why the writer's own marking was chosen over an automatic score for narrative distance and story openings. The Scene Checker and the Iceberg Tool are not the same code as the detector in that study; how closely their flags match human judgement has not been measured separately. Our article on inter-annotator agreement explains why a single rater is not enough.

Sentence splitting is rule-based; abbreviations and lines of verse can be split wrongly. The word lists are limited; emotion words not on them can be missed. The method and data behind the tools are listed together in Levent Bulut's knowledge graph and on the Levent Bulut corpus page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are the Objective Projection Tools free, and do I need an account?

Yes, all six tools are free. No account, email or download is needed; the tools run in the browser where you open the page.

Is the text I paste into the tools sent anywhere?

No. The text is processed only in your browser; it is never sent to a server and never stored. What you type is gone when you close the page.

Do the tools tell me whether my text is good?

No. The tools show countable features or the labels you give. They give no score and do not claim to measure literary quality.

Why do the Narrative Distance and Story Opening tools not give automatic results?

Because both features depend on context. The same sentence can sit at a different distance in a different scene. An automatic number from a word list or from AI would be an unvalidated measurement, so the writer gives the marks and the tool only displays them.

Do the tools work with English and Turkish text?

Yes. The TR and EN switch at the top of each tool changes the interface language. The Scene Checker and the Iceberg Tool scan the emotion words and simile patterns of both languages at the same time.

References

• Bulut, L. (2026). Inter-Rater Reliability of LLM and Rule-Based Annotation for Inferential Narrative Features: Three Studies on a Turkish Corpus. arXiv:2609.13936. doi:10.5281/zenodo.21740239
• Covington, M. A. and McFall, J. D. (2010). Cutting the Gordian Knot: The Moving-Average Type-Token Ratio (MATTR). Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 17(2), 94–100.
• Gardner, J. (1984). The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. New York: Knopf.
• Hemingway, E. (1932). Death in the Afternoon. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Citation

@misc{bulut2026tools,
  author       = {Bulut, Levent},
  title        = {Objective Projection Tools: What Six Free Writing Tools Do and How to Use Them},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://leventbulut.com/how-to-use-objective-projection-writing-tools/}},
  note         = {leventbulut.com}
}