Random Title Generator Upgrade

I created a random title generator a while back that I could use to generate ideas for writing exercises. I wasn’t happy with it, so this week I made a bunch of improvements.

 https://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/random-title-generator/

In the writer’s group I joined we used a random prompt generator to come up with ideas for our writing exercise. My earlier attempt was meant to come up with a better version of that. I was not successful.

While the earlier version of my generator worked, the titles it generated were a disappointment. It worked from three word lists: a random article (i.e.: The or A), a random adjective and a random noun. It had no trouble picking random words, but the list of words I didn’t do a very good job of picking the words to use.

I began by redoing the list of nouns. I threw out the list I had and started over. First, I added a list of occupation descriptions I found on the Internet. That gave me a list of 300 words. Then, inspired by that, I added other words that describe people. I also added a few animals. I ended up with 527 words.

Next, I replaced the list of adjectives. I’m not sure where I got the initial set of adjectives. Once I had that, I added more based on the words I’d already added. That gave me 411 adjectives.

Then I worked on the list of articles. In my earlier version of the generator, I just used words like “the”, “A”, “Some” and a couple others. I had been reading some Perry Mason books recently and they inspired me to use the opening formula for those, which was “The Case of the”. I generated replacements for the word “case” and ended up with 196 words.

One problem is that these openings aren’t really articles anymore. I couldn’t think of a more appropriate word, so I just left it as that.

With these word lists, the title generator can create 42,453,012 different titles. In testing I found that it still would produce some titles that didn’t make sense. However, that was less of a problem than my earlier version.

The feedback so far has been positive. It does seem that most of the titles come across as mystery/detective stories. The problem was that when I was putting them together, my thoughts tended toward a mystery/detective story. I think I should come up with some other openings that suggest other types of stories.

The title generator had three buttons to generate the title: “Random Article”, “Random Adjective” and “Random Person”. One of the people in my writer’s group suggested that I also have a button that generated a whole new title. I added that.

I've put the generator on my website instead of being on its own like before. https://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/random-title-generator/

I did a writing exercise based on a title from the updated version of the title generator: "The Tyranny of the Hungry Bookkeeper". I haven't recorded it yet.

I am open to making further changes to the generator. If you have any, please get in touch. I can send you the word lists and the html code I used if you want to create your own title generator. I may go ahead and post links to them on the generator page.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog