Well, after a “final run” the Plot Twist generator is done.  Well, “done.”

I made a big push to flesh out data, and improve and enhance some of the existing data patterns and basic plot types.  I’m going to consider it “done” for now because I really can’t think of much else to do.  I’m sure there’s plenty more, but I won’t be doing it for now.

Now that I’ve done both this and the Writing Prompt Generator, I’ve had a pretty useful insight about these kinds of generators.

The short form?  These seemingly inspirational generators would work better if done a bit more “scientifically.”

At first, I figured both Writing Prompts and Plot Twist Generators would be best created in a kind of free-form, inspired way.  Surf examples, try ideas, play around, integrate feedback, get creative.  That seemed to make sense at the time.

But when I look back to it, it actually made things more complicated.  I might “go down the rabbit hole” and get lost in one kind of plot twist.  I’d try some data structures that turned out to not be quite right.  I’d revise data, which gets a bit complex once you’ve already set so much information up.

The end result is that, if I’d taken time to break the data down more carefully, analyze deep structure, and look for common patterns this would have gone easier.  I wouldn’t have been able to jump right into it, but it would have been faster, easier, and probably better.

Also I could have written it up for people’s reference.

So, lesson learned.  Now onward to some other generators after a bit of a break . . .

• Steve