Where to Get Ideas for Your NaNoWriMo Project
As winter slowly draws closer to us, it’s time for the annual tradition of hand-wringing, self-loathing, and maybe, maybe, writing a novel in 30 days. National Novel Writing Month every November is a beacon of hope for many successful people who want to not only start but finish a draft of a novel in one month.
Can you make up for 11 months of lack of work on the novel by squeezing all your creativity into this short space of time? This is a major challenge. And this is what many people have tried to achieve, including me.
But now is November 1st and you are speechless. You want to flex your writing muscles, but with everything else that happens in your life and in our often hellish world, you have … nothing.
Plot generators rush to the rescue. If you’re not picky about who and what in your story, and just want to get started now, you can leave the details to chance and let the magic machine decide for you.
How do they work? I have no idea. It does not matter. Don’t hesitate to learn how they work. Just pick one of these generators and get started.
Reedsey
Self-publishing platform. Reedy’s new plot generator is the prettiest of them all. It promises one million plot combinations: you can choose from genres of drama, fantasy, detective, romance or sci-fi movies and get detailed information about the main character, minor character, plot, and even a twist. Because every story has a twist.
The best part about this generator is that you can block any generated field if you like what was generated and then keep shuffling the rest until you are satisfied. When you’re done, you can save the plot and email it to yourself.
Writing exercises
WritingExercises.co.uk’s random plot generator lets you choose up to six elements, including two characters, setting, situation, theme, and character action. You can keep pressing each button until you get the combination that works for you.
There are tons of other generators and writing tips on this website. I love Take Three Nouns, which forms two concrete nouns and one abstract noun to inspire freewriting.
Rangen
The RanGen Story Generator only gives you three genres to choose from (Action, Fantasy or Romance), but allows you to choose from three different levels of story detail. Need a little push? Select the “room” level. Tend to get stuck in the middle and ends of stories? You might want to go for “full”.
While this website is jam-packed with ads – seriously, brace yourself – its writing tools are clearly a work of love. Educational goodness is not limited to plots. You can createtraits and quirks , awkward moments or character names , among other options.
Writer’s digest
It won’t give you plot on a platter, but Writer’s Digest’s weekly creative writing tips can help you figure it out. Some are more complex and require you to write a story about a specific character or event. Others are more open, like there is only candy in scripts or plots.