Story Title Generator

When I’m teaching narrative designs people often ask how to generate ideas for stories so I used some source code from Justin Bakse’s Computational Form class at Parsons School of Design to make this story generator. It uses an array of customizable prefixes, pronouns, adjectives and mini-phrases to create titles, most of which seem to be dystopian, fantasy and maybe a little bit western.

CODE

Feel free to copy, paste and customize the code below to create your own custom story ideas. Personally I find the titles this generates to be pretty inspiring and its easy to imagine using any of these titles to kickstart a project. The titles to the left are only a few of the dozens I generated.

injectInterface();

document.getElementById("title").textContent = generateTitle();

document.getElementById("subtitle").textContent = generateSubtitle();

function generateTitle() {

var name_prefixes = ["Master", "Mr.", "Professor", "Mrs.", "Princess", "Prince", "The Pauper's", "The", "Betsy", "Billy", "Johnny"];

var primary_nouns = ["Crystal", "Bugle", "Dreamer", "Dream", "Castle", "Moss", "Mountain", "Pit", "Bigfoot", "Dream maker", "Oathbreaker", "Bard", "X'arahan'tu", "Magic", "Acorn", "Sun", "Son", "Stump", "Arm"];

var adjectives = ["Lost", "Five", "Faded", "Ancient", "Blackened", "Den of", "Despairing", "Golden", "Many", "Merry", "Clever", "Wonderful", "Sullen", "Angry", "Little", "Cowardly", "Silver", "Lasting", "Heavy", "Festive", "Gleeful", "Enchanted", "Wise", "Wistful", "Dark", "Untold"];

var secondary_nouns = ["Hearts", "Stones", "Diamond Dogs", "Painted Toes", "Songs", "Tales", "Lords", "Promise", "Screams", "Plagues", "Dreams", "Roads", "Curses", "Spells", "Gloam", "Lands", "Marsh", "Hearts", "Rules", "Swamp", "Tale", "Apex", "Beggar"];

var name_prefix = sample(name_prefixes);

var primary_noun = sample(primary_nouns);

var adjective = sample(adjectives);

var secondary_noun = sample(secondary_nouns);

var title = "";

if (Math.random() < 0.5) {

title = `${name_prefix} ${primary_noun} and the ${adjective} ${secondary_noun}`;

} else {

title = `The ${adjective} ${secondary_noun} of ${name_prefix} ${primary_noun}`;

}

return title;

}

function generateSubtitle() {

var story_adjectives = ["Forgotten", "Merry", "Clever", "Baleful", "Deep Space", "Whimsical", "Trivial", "Forlorn", "Dank and Faded", "Once in a Lifetime", "Cyborg's", "Hot Mess", "Dark", "Precog's", "Bed Full of", "Tattooed"];

var story_formats = ["Quest", "Novel", "Dream of Ages", "Song", "Crystalized Puzzle", "Legend", "Quest", "Curse", "Tale", "Diaspora", "Whisper of the Heart", "Monster"];

var adjective = sample(story_adjectives);

var format = sample(story_formats);

var subtitle = `A ${adjective} ${format}`;

return subtitle;

}

function sample(array) {

const index = Math.floor(Math.random() * array.length);

return array[index];

}

function injectInterface() {

document.body.insertAdjacentHTML('beforeend', `

@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:300,700');

body {

text-align: center;

font-family: 'Roboto', sans-serif;

}

.wrap {

display: table;

padding: 50px;

margin: 50px auto;

text-align: center;

}

#title {

font-size: 50px;

font-weight: bold;

text-transform: uppercase;

line-height: .9em;

}

#subtitle {

margin-top: .75em;

font-weight: 300;

font-size: 25px;

font-weight: normal;

}

</style>

<div id="title">Title</div>

<div id="subtitle">Subtitle</div>

</div>

`);

}