Generating random ideas

For as long as I can remember life on the web, there has been the Surrealist Compliment Generator - a simple bit of programming that allows you to reload the page over and over, telling you that your eyes are like “milky pools of pantyhose” that you have “the intrepid appeal of a carnivorous apple on its way to a pile of cadaverous stones” and that “sound barricades itself into rolls of peanut butter when you speak.”

The same morsel of technology is used in abundance throughout the web,  especially when it comes to helping creative writers and bloggers find quick ideas and prompts to kick-start their writing when blocked. Sometimes the exercises that seem the silliest yield the best results.

Here are a few of the random generators out there:

• Seventh Sanctum’s writing challenge generator. (There are several other generators on the site, as well as technical resources to help you create your own random generator.)

• Prompts contain a technical parameter, a character parameter and a word or phrase for inspiration at the almost totally random writing exercise generator.

•  For personal journals or blogs, there are blog and essay prompts here or here.

• If you’ve been dying to write a B-movie screenplay, try the random logline generator.

• A random writing prompt generator for kids.

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