Home For Fiction – Blog

Looking for a more creativity-based solution? Try Story Dice, a program I recently made.

Please note that none of my Android apps is any longer maintained – and they’re not even available on Google Play anymore – for reasons you can read about here. If you still have any of the Home for Fiction Android apps installed on your phone, you’re advised to uninstall them. The post below should be seen purely as a snapshot of history.

After finishing my ambitious Mansion Escape text adventure app, I thought to make something a little simpler. The Plot Generator and Writing Prompt app is a simple, lightweight app for Android that helps writers come up with new ideas. This writing prompt app, as the name implies, offers authors an idea to work and expand on. Effectively, it produces a short text containing what is a plot description of sorts. You can think of it as the back cover of a book.

The generated text consists of a basic structure (common in all generated combinations) and a set of randomized items, such as protagonist and antagonist names, gender, character attributes, occupation, field of narrative tension, and others.

How the App Works

The logic of the app is both to provide a format compatible with narrative expectations (in other words: to create a text that could be plausibly seen on the back cover of a real book) and, at the same time, to allow the writer/user to fill in the details using his or her imagination. The app cannot create a complete detailed plot; it can merely allow the writer to come up with ideas.

The generated text consists of a basic structure (common in all generated combinations, though with randomized format) and a set of randomized items. The app randomly selects the following items, among others:

• Protagonist name (random gender).
• Antagonist name (random gender).
• Protagonist character attributes.
• Antagonist character attributes.
• Protagonist occupation (in some randomized structures also antagonist occupation).
• Fields of narrative tension (some elements from an independent source, some related to the Protagonist’s workplace).
• Narrative resolution (randomly picked between running out of time and running out of options).