Tagged: stichomancy

10,000 New Writing Prompts

We spent the summer carefully curating a new collection of text snippets to add to our Stichomancy Writing Prompt Generator. For those of you who are new around here, stichomancy is the art of divination through random passages from books. You grab a book, close your eyes, riffle the pages, and poke your finger (or a pin) into a page at random. You then read the sentence or paragraph that you stabbed and figure out how it relates to the question that’s eating at you — sort of like a horoscope. In our case we dispense with the whole fortune telling aspect, and simply use the phrases that the universe thrusts upon us to inspire quick fiction pieces. And with our handy dandy Writing Prompt Generator, we dispense with the whole “shuffling through books” part of the process, too. And so can you!

Head on over to the SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises LLC Stichomancy Writing Prompt Generator today, and begin your journey into the world of chaotic inspiration! You’ll be glad you did.

Writing Prompt Generator: The Enhugening

Once again we have added several thousand new phrases to the Stichomancy Writing Prompt Generator, making it the largest such writing prompt generator known to man!

<hold for applause>

And just in time for NaNoWriMo! Which we don’t participate in, but maybe you do. And maybe you’re looking for the perfect inspiration for your masterpiece. If that’s the case, just click here to visit our generator, choose 3, 5, or 7 prompt phrases, and get crackin’!

Or if you prefer a different sort of prompt generator, one that doesn’t put words in your mouth, but merely demands the inclusion of four intriguing story elements, you’ll want to check out our Four Elements Generator. You’ll be glad you did.

Stichomancy Generator Update

r-avatarLongtime readers probably already know this, but for the benefit of our new fans (welcome!) here’s the lowdown on the writing prompts we post here at the Skelleyverse.

Most of them are stichomancy prompts, in which the author is challenged to write a short piece of fiction (or occasionally, verse) utilizing — verbatim — a list of phrases drawn from other sources. Stichomancy originated as a form of divination performed by flipping to a random page in a book and pointing to a random spot on that page to see what it says. We use it to compile the required ingredients for a writing prompt.

And, this being the twenty-first century, we’ve gone digital with the process to create our online stichomancy writing prompt generator. The snippets it returns are sourced from books, television shows, websites, and other places, including conversations we’ve actually had in real life. Wondering which of the bizarre phrases represent things we had some reason to say out loud is a torment we gladly infect you with. You’ll learn to love us for it.

This week we added another large batch of fodder to the infernal engine that cranks these things out. Jen did the harvesting, and she’s very pleased with the interplay of new flavors. Kent is insisting you’ll be interested to know that the generator’s code is very clever about not repeating results, so we’ll mention it even though we doubt anyone is as interested in that as he is. What it all means to you is a premium writing-prompt experience that keeps delivering new surprises. Give it a try! Share your results in the comments.