Prompt: Writing Roulette: Plot Generators to Spice up Your Literary Life

Posted on by Jaclyn

 

 

 

Need a little spice and adventure in your writing life?  Did you make a New Year’s Resolution to write more and now your motivation is waning?  Did you join the My 500 Words Challenge, but can’t figure out what to write about?  Maybe you and the muse have just gotten into a rut and need a little more passion in your relationship.

Perhaps it’s time to leave things up to chance, play a little writing roulette and see where it takes you.  There is a huge array of plot generators out there, which will give you anything from a random sentence to hypothetical scenarios, to symbolism, to stories complete with weather and villains.  Here are some fun tools that might help get you through a little bit of writer’s block:

The Big Huge Thesaurus Story Plot Generator: 5.1 million possible story plots.  Just click the link for six possibilities.  Not inspired by those?  Just hit refresh until you find one that gets your fire going.  This one actually started me on a novel.

Plot Generator UK: This one takes a little bit more of your own input into consideration.  Choose a genre.  The options are Romance, Crime, Teen Vampire, Mystery, and Song Lyrics.  Or (my personal favorite) you can recreate a lost Bronte Sisters novel, complete with a well-to-do hero and a poor, lower class hero and a weather description. For this one, you can choose the names, jobs, descriptions, weapons, and hometowns of your characters, or the generator will suggest them for you.

Writing Exercises UK: This generator gives you characters, a setting, a situation, and a theme and you can put them together to create your plot.  If you don’t like one of the elements you’ve been given, just hit the button again to get a new one.  One of the exciting things about this site is that it also has other writing exercises, like a random first line, random title, subject or random words to use.  Very, very useful if you just need a little kickstart.

Seventh Sanctum Story Generator:  Another one where you can choose the genre, this generator gives more in-depth scenarios in Fantasy, Science Fiction, Modern, or Free-for-All categories.  These plots are interesting because of the details that they contain.  This website also has a What-If-inator and a Symbolitron, which might be my favorite find in all of the plot creators!

Hopefully this will be enough to get your writing juices flowing.  If any of these work out for you, please share the results with us!

 

Creative Commons love to Adam Lerner for the awesome photo!

17 thoughts on “Prompt: Writing Roulette: Plot Generators to Spice up Your Literary Life”

  11. Thanks for these resources and for noticing my blog. My writing problem is not one of ideas and inspiration as I am drawing on the experiences of others and then, later, on my own. My problem is wading through the complexities of WordPress. Up to now my first blog has been hosted by an organisation and they sort out the technicalities. In this case I am on my own, with help from willing friends (who have different hardware configurations).

  14. I almost never get writer’s block, but I LOVE random writing challenges. I guess I just love inventing connections where there are none, even if they’re weird. 🙂 These look interesting. I never would have considered using generators for anything beyond journaling, but now I can see how they might be fun to try on bigger projects. Thanks so much for sharing. Will definitely give you credits for inspiration if I give them a try.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *