Need A Boost? Try Generators :)

The new year has started off as a little bit of a surprise for me. I've been doing more writing in the last few days than I have in a years. Granted, it is fanfiction, so it's not really original writing, but hey! - if my muse keeps going and my writing gets better, I may just turn around and write something. I won't promise anything; I'm just excited I've started writing again.

Those who know me personally probably aren't as surprised as I am. I used to write a bunch in junior high and high school, both original stories and fanfiction. When I got into college, I got pretty busy with school work and essays that it just drained me creatively... I only even got back into it after a joke a coworker and I were making at work about Pokemon, then it turned into 'hey, you should so write that' and then I just decided to do it. Neat, huh?

For those who want to get back into writing, or start writing creatively, I highly recommend trying some computer story generators to get your thinking process going. My favorite site to go to for story ideas is Seventh Sanctum where there's lots of different genres to choose from. It also has the best links section leading to other websites with story (and even for fanfiction) generators.

For example on how to use generated ideas incorporated into your story, here's a link to one of my recent Pokemon short stories - Standing Up.

I used only a few elements to generate the story idea for this piece.

1 ) Random Number Generator : I told the computer to randomly generate a number between 1 and 650 (an approximate number of total Pokemon) and it gave me '297'

2 ) Pokedex : I consulted the national Pokedex to see which Pokemon was labelled number 297 - Hariyama. So I picked him as the main focus of my short story. I read the Pokedex information to make sure I got the character right.

3 ) First Line Generator : My weakness when it comes to writing is always my beginnings, so I generated a sentence from this handy generator and got - "He hadn't meant to scare him" - that I would use as the first line of my story.

Hariyama is a big Pokemon so I thought what would be scared by him? - a little kid! And Hariyama didn't mean to, because Hariyama only wanted to play.

Tada! And that's how 'Standing Up' was born :)

I really like this method for Pokemon fanfiction and I have a few more with the same elements in progress. So, the generators are really helpful. I hope my explanation showed just how they could help you too!