Archive for the 'Short Stories' Category

Today I discovered an absolutely useless web site pretending to be helpful to writers and teachers looking for writing ideas.

The site is called The Story Starter. (I hesitate to give a link to it.) It claims to have 298 million different story starters. I have better things to do than to sit here and count them. The claim could be millions out but that is irrelevant.

The sentences are blatantly computer generated to a formula. Just looking at half a dozen will show you the formula – which doesn’t work. Being automated as it is, the computer creates many sentences which are nonsense. Here are a few examples:

The sly spy wrote a poem in the skyscraper to discover the dark secret.

The boring ballet dancer produced a movie in the hidden room to create a diversion.

The clumsy hotel manager composed a song in a lonely bus stop to find the missing horse.

I could go on – but you get the point – it’s pointless. Randomly selected sentences like that are meaningless; they are utter garbage and nonsense. I’m sure it is a clever computer programme but the results are pitiful.

I would say that you would have to troll through many thousands of sentences to find one that is remotely useable, or sensible.

By way of contrast, some of the articles I have written on this blog have been very successful in attracting traffic. They rank only a few steps below “The Story Starter” on Google but are far more useable. Click on the link below to see some very useful short story starters, with links to more.

Link:

• Sixteen Scintillating Short Story Starters

Stay tuned for more of these useful story starters in coming weeks.