Random Story Generator

What the random story generator does

Each thing this produces is a whole story in miniature: a character, a setting, a way it begins, a moment it turns, a theme running underneath. "The story is about a priest. It starts in a large city in Europe. It climaxes with a spiritual experience." Press the button and it draws one at random from a large built-in library.

And "assembled" is the exact right word, because that is precisely how each of these was built: stock parts, snapped together into something that reads like a plot. What almost nobody realises is that this is not a cheap modern shortcut. It is, very nearly, how the oldest and greatest stories in human history were composed, and two scholars proved it by chasing down the last people on Earth who still did it live.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. Pull a batch if you are hunting rather than deciding.
2. Press Generate. A fresh set every time.
3. Press Copy to take the whole lot with you.

Every story here is assembled from parts

Look closely at a few of the stories this produces and you can see the seams, the interchangeable slots being filled.

There is a slot for who the story is about: a priest, a bounty hunter, a tired anthropologist. A slot for where it happens: a bar, a gun shop in Anchorage, a fog-shrouded world made by magic. A slot for how it opens, another for how it climaxes, another for how it ends, and one more for a theme to thread through the whole thing. The generator keeps an inventory of ready-made pieces for each slot, and it builds a story by grabbing one of each and combining them.

This feels mechanical, and it is, and that is usually taken as a mark against it. A story built from parts, the thinking goes, cannot be a real story, because real stories are created whole, from inspiration, not bolted together from a parts bin.

Except that this instinct is wrong, and gloriously so. Assembling narrative from a stock of interchangeable, ready-made parts is not the opposite of the great storytelling tradition. It is the great storytelling tradition, the actual technique behind some of the foundational works of world literature, and we know this because of a piece of detective work in the 1930s that reads like a story itself.

The illiterate singers who did the same thing

For a long time there was a puzzle about Homer, the poet credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the vast epics at the root of Western literature. The puzzle was simple and troubling: these poems come from a time and place with little or no writing. So how could anyone have composed works so long and intricate with no way to write them down? A poem of that size cannot be held in a human head word for word. It was called the Homeric Question, and it went unanswered for over a century.

In the 1930s a young American scholar named Milman Parry worked out the answer, and then did something remarkable: he went and proved it in the field. His idea was that Homer had never memorised those epics at all. Instead, Homer had composed them on the fly, out loud, as he performed, using a technique built on ready-made building blocks.

Parry had noticed that Homer is full of repeated stock phrases, the same fixed chunks reused constantly: the dawn is always "rosy-fingered", the sea is always "wine-dark", a hero is always "swift-footed Achilles". These were not the poet running out of ideas. They were tools. Each was a ready-made piece that fit a particular slot in the rhythm of the line, so that a singer performing live could reach for a pre-built phrase to carry the metre while his mind worked ahead to what came next. A whole inventory of interchangeable parts, combined and recombined in the moment.

To test this, Parry and his student Albert Lord travelled to what was then Yugoslavia, because there, in the 1930s, a living tradition of oral epic still survived. Illiterate village singers called guslari, accompanying themselves on a single-stringed instrument, could perform immense heroic poems, thousands of lines long, entirely from memory and improvisation, having never read a word in their lives. Parry and Lord recorded thousands of hours of them.

And what they found settled the question completely. The singers were not reciting fixed, memorised texts. Ask a guslar to perform the same song twice and it would come out differently each time, longer or shorter, varied in its details, because he was not remembering it. He was rebuilding it live, every time, from his own stock of formulas, stock scenes and stock phrases, snapping the ready-made parts together as he went. Exactly, in principle, what Homer had done. Exactly, in principle, what this generator does.

The oral poet carried a parts bin in his head, an inventory of pieces for every slot a heroic story needs, and assembled the epic anew in each performance. Parry died young, at thirty-three, before he could finish writing it all up, and Lord carried the work on and made it one of the most important ideas in the study of literature. Its conclusion is worth sitting with: the deepest, oldest, most revered stories we have were not written whole from pure inspiration. They were assembled from parts, brilliantly, in real time.

Using the parts to find a story

Once you know that assembly is a legitimate and ancient way to make stories, this tool stops being a gimmick and becomes what a guslar's stock of formulas was: raw material to build from. Here is how to use it well.

Treat the output as a frame, not a finished thing. What the generator hands you is a skeleton of slots already filled: a who, a where, a shape. That is the beginning of the work, not the end of it. The guslar's formulas did not write the poem; they gave him something to build the poem out of. Your job is the building, the actual telling that turns "a priest in a European city having a spiritual experience" into a story only you could write.

Mine the friction between the parts. Because the pieces are combined at random, they often clash in interesting ways, a bounty hunter with a mysterious admirer, a romance set in Antarctica. That clash is a gift. The gap between two parts that do not obviously fit is exactly where your invention goes to work, reconciling them, and the reconciling is the story.

Pull many and keep the live one. A single guslar knew enough formulas to build countless different songs, and you should treat the generator the same way: generate freely, throw most away, and keep the one combination that unexpectedly sparks. The value is not in any single result but in the fast supply of possibilities, one of which will catch.

Change the parts once they have done their job. The moment a generated element has got you moving, feel free to abandon it. Swap the priest for a fugitive, move the city, drop the theme. The stock parts exist to get you started, and a real writer, like a real singer, alters and departs from the inherited pieces the instant the living story takes over.

Take what this assembles and finish the assembly yourself. You are doing, with a parts bin in front of you, the same thing the great oral poets did with a parts bin in their heads.

Where these come from

The stories are built from sets of characters, settings, openings, turning points, endings and themes our team wrote and curated by hand, combined into full premises. Your browser assembles them at random. Nothing you do here leaves your device.

Questions people ask

Was Homer really made up on the spot?

According to the widely accepted Parry-Lord theory, yes, in essence. The Homeric epics are thought to have been composed in live performance using a large stock of ready-made formulaic phrases and scenes, rather than written or memorised word for word. Parry and Lord supported this by studying living oral singers in the Balkans who composed enormous poems the same way.

Who were the guslari?

They were traditional oral poets of the South Slavic region who sang long heroic epics while accompanying themselves on the gusle, a single-stringed instrument. Many were illiterate, yet could perform poems thousands of lines long by improvising from a deep store of formulas, which made them a living model for how Homer likely worked.

Can a story built from parts be any good?

It can be as good as the storyteller who finishes it. The generated premise is only a frame; the quality comes from what you build on it. Some of the greatest literature ever made was assembled from stock components, so there is nothing about the method that limits the result, provided a real imagination takes over from the parts bin.

What if the elements do not fit together?

That is often the most useful case. A mismatched combination forces you to invent a reason the pieces belong together, and that act of reconciliation is frequently where the actual story is found. Rather than discarding an odd pairing, try treating the oddness as the puzzle your story exists to solve.

Can I write and publish something based on one of these?

Yes. A generated premise is a starting point with no claim on the work you make from it. Once you have written an actual story, the characters, the words and the choices are yours, and whatever the generator handed you will be a distant scaffold you have long since built past.

References

1. Oral-formulaic method. Academy of American Poets. https://poets.org/glossary/oral-formulaic-method
2. Oral-formulaic composition. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral-formulaic_composition
3. Foley, J. M. The Theory of Oral Composition. Indiana University Press. https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/the-theory-of-oral-composition/