J. R. CARPENTER || Story Generation(s)

"J. R. Carpenter, author of Words the Dog Knows, Entre Ville, The Cape, and other fine works of e-lit, print, and xerography, has delightfully re-purposed one of my 1k story generators to have it tell stories involving her and a hermit crab named Pookie. The program has grown to about 2k, but it uses the same simple (and surprisingly effective) method as my first generator does: It simply removes all but 5-9 sentences from a sequence, eliding some of what's been written. Sometimes the reader is left to wonder who the hermit is." Nick Montfort, http://nickm.com/post/2009/07/story-generation-with-pookie-and-jr/

I've died and gone to Devon.
In North America, roads this narrow wouldn't even count as driveways.
If this is the wrong side of the road, I don't care what's right.
If this is the driveway, then I can't wait to see the house.
We can't hear the river from the house, but we can see it.
Everybody insists we're by the seaside. I can smell but not see the sea.
Flotsam on a tidal river is a strange mixture of oak leaves and seaweed.
This is an achingly beautiful place to come across a little death.

"If you move around all your life, you can't find where you come from on a map. All those places where you lived are just that: places. You don't come from any of them; you come from a series of events. And those are mapped in memory. Contingent, precarious events, without the counterpane of place to muffle the knowledge of how unlikely we are. Almost not born at every turn. Without a place, events slow-tumbling through time become your roots. Stories shading into one another. You come from a plane crash. From a war that brought your parents together." Anne-Marie MacDonald, As The Crow Flies, Toronto: Knopf, 2003, page 36.

Here is one example of a story generated by Auto-Autobiography:

Here is my story:
I was born in wedlock - for some reason, this surprises me.
I come from a war that brought my parents together.
My mother had a long memory and a short fuse.
I live in a wonderful house.
I work hard at not having to work too hard.
I wish I'd said that differently.
My best friend kept insisting I learn to play guitar.
In retrospect, she read way too many Russian novels.
I love it when we lie in bed plotting the downfall of our enemies.
Next year, let's forget every single thing we learned this year.
In future, we will know many beginnings and no ends.

DOWNLOAD autobio.py

Viewing Instructions:

Download the python file to your desktop and unzip. On a Mac or Linux system, you can run the story generator by opening a Terminal Window, typing "cd Desktop", and typing "python filename.py". Hint: look for Terminal in your Utilities folder. These Python story generator runs on Windows, too, but you will probably need to install Python first: version 2.6.5. Once Python is installed you can double click on the file and it will automatically launch and run in the terminal window. Every time you press ENTER a new version of the story will appear.