Story Idea Generator

What the story idea generator does

Press the button and it hands you a premise. Sometimes a compact one, a woman who cannot die escaping from prison, a vacuum cleaner finding evidence of a murder. Sometimes a fuller sketch, with a character, a setting, a thing that goes wrong, and a shape for how it might end.

Pull a batch and argue with them until one refuses to let you go.

Behind the button is a question people have been fighting about for two hundred years: how many stories are there, really? One French writer sat down and tried to count them all, and the number he reached is worth knowing before you write anything.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. Pull a big 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.

The man who counted every plot and got thirty-six

The claim starts with an eighteenth-century Venetian playwright named Carlo Gozzi, who said, more or less in passing, that there are only thirty-six dramatic situations. Every tragedy ever staged, every story worth telling, thirty-six underlying set-ups and no more.

It might have stayed an offhand remark, except that Goethe picked it up. In his recorded conversations he mentions Gozzi's number approvingly, and adds a detail that gives it teeth: his friend Schiller, one of the great dramatists of the age, took great pains to find more than thirty-six, and could not even find as many. Two of the finest literary minds in Europe went looking for a thirty-seventh situation and came back empty-handed.

Then, in 1895, a Frenchman named Georges Polti decided to actually do the work. He took Gozzi's number as a challenge and went through the whole canon he could reach, classical Greek tragedy, French drama, everything he could analyse, sorting situations into categories to see whether thirty-six would hold.

It held. He published the result as a book, The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, and it has been in print ever since, quietly passed between writers for over a century.

The situations are exactly what they sound like once you see them. Supplication: someone in danger begs a power that may or may not help. The Enigma: a problem or riddle that must be solved. Revolt. Pursuit. Vengeance for kin. Rivalry between relatives. Recovery of a lost one. Each is a bare bones configuration of people and pressure, defined not by what happens but by the forces pushing against each other.

Here is the part almost everyone gets backwards about Polti, and it is the best thing about him. He did not find thirty-six and feel that the puzzle of literature was solved. He found thirty-six and was disappointed. He thought human storytelling ought to be richer than that, that a great civilisation should have invented more than three dozen basic predicaments, and he half-hoped someone would prove him wrong by finding more. He was not celebrating a limit. He was mourning one.

A situation is not a story

The thirty-six are worth knowing precisely because of what they cannot do, and understanding the gap is the most useful thing a writer can take from any of this.

A situation is a configuration of forces. Someone wants something; something stands in the way. That is Pursuit, or Supplication, or Revolt, and you can state it in a sentence. But nobody has ever been moved by a configuration of forces. A situation is the setup on a chessboard before a single piece has moved, and no one weeps at the arrangement of the pieces.

The story is what a specific person does inside the situation. Not that a fugitive is pursued, but that this particular fugitive, with these particular loyalties and this particular fear, makes this particular choice at the worst possible moment. The premise this generator hands you is a situation. The story is everything you decide after you accept it, and none of it is in the premise, because the premise is a door, not a room.

This is why two writers given the identical prompt produce nothing alike. The situation is shared, public, one of thirty-six. The choices are yours, and there are not thirty-six of those. There are as many as there are ways to be a person under pressure, which is to say there is no number.

So the smallness of thirty-six is not a ceiling on originality. It is the opposite. It tells you that originality was never going to come from the setup, because the setups ran out centuries ago and were already exhausted when Sophocles was working. Originality lives entirely in the second move, the one the generator cannot make for you: what this person does about it.

Where the ideas in this list actually come from

Look closely at the premises this generator produces and you can see the machinery, because it is doing in miniature exactly what Polti described.

A premise like "the president is trapped by a hurricane in high school" is three ordinary pieces jammed together: a powerful person, a natural disaster, and a place where that person absurdly does not belong. None of the three is interesting alone. The spark is entirely in the collision, the friction of a president in a high school, and your mind immediately starts working to reconcile the mismatch, which is to say it starts writing.

That is the oldest trick in invention, and it is not really different from what a working writer does. Take a familiar situation, one of the thirty-six, and force it against an element it does not fit. A murder, which is ordinary, discovered by a vacuum cleaner, which is not. A bomb, which is a thriller cliche, defused by a bad chef, which reframes the whole thing. The premise is a situation plus an unexpected collision, and the collision is what opens the gap your imagination rushes to fill.

The fuller sketches in the list do the same work at greater length, handing you a character, a setting, a disruption and a possible ending, which is simply a situation with more of its variables filled in. And the more of them are filled in, the more the remaining blanks itch, because a half-specified story is far harder to leave alone than a blank page.

Which is the whole reason to use one. Not because it contains a story, but because a situation plus a collision is the smallest possible thing that makes a person want to find out what happens next, and wanting to find out is where writing starts.

Where these come from

The ideas are built from a set of characters, situations, disruptions and outcomes our team wrote and curated by hand, combined into full premises. Your browser puts them together at random. Nothing you do here leaves your device.

Questions people ask

Are there really only thirty-six plots?

It depends entirely on how coarsely you count, which is why the number has been argued about for two centuries. Polti reached thirty-six by sorting situations at a particular level of abstraction; sort more finely and you get hundreds, more coarsely and some people get as few as one or two. What everyone agrees on is that the number of basic setups is small and the number of actual stories is not, because the stories live in the execution.

Does knowing the plot is unoriginal hurt my writing?

The reverse, usually. Once you accept that your setup is ancient and shared, the pressure to invent a brand new situation lifts, and you can put your effort where it actually pays, into the specific person and the specific choices. Almost every enduring story runs on one of the oldest setups there is. What makes it endure is never the setup.

Can I publish something built from one of these?

Yes. A premise is a starting point and carries no claim on what you make from it. The words, the characters and the choices are yours, and by the time you have written an actual story, whatever you began with will be a distant scaffold you have mostly torn down.

What if the premise is ridiculous?

The ridiculous ones are often the most useful, because the collision is sharpest. A president trapped by a hurricane in a high school forces you to reconcile things that do not fit, and that reconciling is invention. If a premise makes you laugh or object, that reaction is a thread, and pulling it is frequently more productive than a premise that sounds sensible and inert.

What is the real difference between a premise and a plot?

A premise is the situation you start from, statable in a line. A plot is the specific sequence of choices and consequences that follows once a particular person is dropped into it. The generator supplies the first and can never supply the second, which is both its limit and the reason it is useful: it does the part that was always going to be shared, and leaves you the part that was always going to be yours.

References

1. The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations
2. The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations. Futility Closet. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2021/01/26/the-thirty-six-dramatic-situations/
3. The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations. The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia. http://www.artandpopularculture.com/36_plots