Tagged: generator

Fancy Some Stichomancy?

Our stichomancy prompt generator got updated last week, and now contains 38,595 unique phrases.

Like everything in the Writing Cave, this is a collaborative effort. Jen collects and curates the raw materials, and Kent maintains the generator’s data files. We also use it to create the prompts that form our epic chain story.

The source material runs quite a gamut, and includes things that Kent said out loud. See if you can guess which ones those are!

The way we use the generator is to provide us with a fun, quick writing challenge: tie all the phrases together. We’ve been doing it so long now it’s evolved a set of “rules” that we hold each other to, but the goal is to have fun so do what feels right.

Something we don’t use it for is divination, although that is in fact the original purpose of stichomancy itself. Any future foretold by our generator would be absurd in the extreme. (And fairly lighthearted, which means it couldn’t have predicted what’s going on right now in the world.)

Have fun, and feel free to share! We’d love to see what you do with it.

Now Bigger and Weirder Than Ever!

Our long-running chain story (and several hundred other kooky posts) wouldn’t be possible without our stichomancy prompt generator. It’s one of those things we were born to do together: Jen is a magpie for just the right kinds of confounding text snippets, and Kent has a knack for building fun webthings.

Just now we added over 2,000 new prompt phrases, bringing the list almost up to 16,000. So, adding up all the prompts on the Skelleyverse, we’ve only used about 10% of the generator’s potential phrases.

Give it a whirl! Use it for a warm-up before you do your “real” writing, or use it as an icebreaker at your meetings. (It works great in both of those modes, we can tell you from direct experience.) Feel free to share your results in the comments!