Story Generator

Story Generator

The Story Generator is sort of like Mad Libs books except you can have it generate stories automatically by plugging in random words from a dictionary. Of course, you can also supply your own words.

Michael Benson
mike@mlbenson.com

Generating Stories

Click "Story" at the bottom to generate stories. On the Story page, select a story template from the select dropdown, then click "Generate story automatically" to let the Story Generator choose words at random from the buil-in dictionary.

Click "Enter your own words for story" to enter your own words. This takes you to the prompt page. Enter your words, then hit "Create Story".

Story Templates

You can create your own story templates, or edit existing ones. In the template, use the notation «n» where 'n' is the prompt number.

The prompts are in the form 'n:category-transforms:Readable prompt' where 'n' corresponds to the story template and 'category' is the category of the word you want to substitute into the story.

The 'transforms' are optional. You can apply certain transformations to the words after they are selected from the dictionary. Transformations currently available are 'plural' (make nouns plural), 'ly' (make adjectives into adverbs), 'ing' (run/running), 'cap' (capitalize word), 'an' (precede the word with 'a' or 'an'). You can have more than one transformation separated by dashes. If a transformation does't work for a particular word, you can add exceptions to the words in the dictionary.

The 'Readable prompt' is also optional. This is the text users see when they are choosing their own words. If this is not supplied, it will use the regular prompt, cleaned up a bit.

Dictionary Words

You can create your own word categories, or edit existing ones by adding or deleting words. Categories don't necessarily have to be grammatical. For example, you could have a category 'silly_words' containing your own silly words. Then, you can create templates that use that category.

The words are in the form 'word|transform:exception' where 'word' is the actual word. The 'transform' is optional. Here you can specify an exception to the transformation. For example, the plural transformation doesn't work for man/men. So, you can specify an exception like this: 'man|plural:men'.