In effect, it makes you think in incredible detail about every single aspect of your story.You start off by typing in the names of your characters, the title, the setting and the basic theme, and then you’re away. The questions come thick and fast: “Why will an audience respond to this story?”; “Why is the protagonist the only person who can resolve the main conflict?” The former makes you think whether you are actually telling anything new, and the latter focuses on a more fundamental element: the protagonist must be the only person who can bring your story to an end. If he or she doesn’t, you have an immediate and very large flaw in your story. The program does not understand your answers, but if you answer a question it will automatically ask a series of ancillary questions: the aim is to make you think, rather than to give specific ideas.I should point out that Collaborator II is not for the Nicholson Bakers of this world, or for anyone who vehemently believes there are no rules in writing. If your storytelling style is elliptical, surreal or abstract, look elsewhere. Collaborator II is based on Aristotle’s six elements of drama – plot, character, thought, diction, music and spectacle – so we can be pretty sure David Lynch didn’t use it to write the screenplay for Eraserhead.The manual says: “Converse with Collaborator as you would with a colleague, trusted friend or writing partner.” However, I would rule out swearing at it or getting drunk with it.

On the plus side, it doesn’t throw dictionaries at your head when you come up with a stupid idea.It is really a nursemaid, encouraging you to test the worth of your ideas and find your own solutions, and by allowing you to print out part or all of your story in report form you can take it away and mull over it. There is a 120,000-word dictionary and a thesaurus too, and the help facility is near-perfect. It also has a Collaborator-generated outline of the classic screenplay It’s A Wonderful Life so you can see how it works in the real world.On the downside, it has obviously been written by Americans with their own peculiar language and views on how the world works. But good old British cynicism will soon get you past that.As it proclaims, Collaborator II is a good buy for both the pro and the aspiring writer (although at pounds 249 plus pounds 10 packing, those aspirations have to be pretty firm.) For the hopefuls, Collaborator II acts as an online creative writing course, honing the all-important structure that is often so elusive in the early days. Publishers, agents and film companies or broadcasters will often point out the writing is good, but the story falls down.

Collaborator II should help you to bypass that and get a vital step closer to a fully polished piece.Collaborator II is available from the Writers’ Software Catalogue, Suite 137, 2 Old Brompton Road, London SW7 3DQ. Telephone: 0171-413 9985, fax: 0171-581 4445.The writer is an author and journalist. His second novel, ‘Nocturne’, was published by Victor Gollancz in November and his next, ‘The Eternal’, will be out in January 1996.. In an industry where chief executives are either scrawny nerds with glasses or men in suits who make the most exciting technology sound like grey flannel, Philippe Kahn has always been an exception. He plays jazz, he flies stunt planes upside-down, and he arrived in the software businesses as a French mathematician.

Another difference is that he’s prepared to admit his mistakes. Until early 1995, he was chief executive of Borland, for a long time the third of the “big three” PC software companies (behind Microsoft and Lotus). But Borland lost first its financial stability, then its position to Novell (which bought two of its leading products) and finally its chief executive. The mistake that preceded that departure – the takeover of Ashton-Tate – was “a big lesson”, according to Mr Kahn.
Now, travelling with a Selmer sax he likes to practise on in his hotel, he is in town to promote Starfish Software, a company he co-founded last year He looks eight years younger and a generation happier.