allbingo | Jul. 4th, 2014

Hello, all! I wanted to stretch my plotting muscles, so I decided to tackle some seven-sentence stories (or seven-sentence summaries). To jump-start my thinking and give myself a set of creative constraints to work with, I put together a Bingo card for them. I'm amused by it, so I thought I'd share it with everyone.

I used the Demographics/Random Sets generator to put together a situation (taken from the Bingo Generator's list of Polti's 36 classical dramatic situations), a setting (taken from ysabetwordsmith's list of setting tropes), and a complication (taken from ysabetwordsmith's list of dramatic situations). I had the Demographics/Random Sets generator make sure to "Use each option only once per generated set", so that I wouldn't end up with repeats in situation, setting, or complication. Then, after I generated the random sets, I had the sets generator port the values over into the bingo generator.

The Demographics/Random Sets generator is still a bit buggy and clunky, but if you're willing to put up with its occasional misbehavior (like: occasionally buttons don't work; occasionally when you're trying to load a set of values from a comma-separated list, the list will be empty, and you'll have to re-load the list again and delete the duplicate empty list at the end), you can get it to do fun things like this. I've done "universe/worldbuilding prompt/word count goal" bingo cards; you could also do "a person, in a place, with a problem" combinations to kick off your plotting.

Anyway, just wanted to let people know that that was available to play with, and that hopefully I'll be able to continue to tweak and refine it. Here's the card I made, and feel free to play with it in any way you feel like: