8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Tag: randomness in creativity

Chapter List

  • Rolling Randomness

    Back before AI could gurgle out a list of spit-polished ideas replete with some sycophantic grovelling towards our imminent greatness, I was in love with random idea generators.

    Don’t confuse one with the other.

    AI makes ideas by stringing together patterns that make sense.

    Idea generators are the Frankenstein-esque cobbling together of digital randomizers and curious arrays of word-bytes that when triggered result in a mad-lib-style shuffling of the input data towards an often nonsensical list of results. There is no intention. Only chance.

    “Write A ROMANTIC DRAMA about A FISH set in HISTORICAL ROME.”

    “Write A SCIENCE FANTASY about A BARISTA set in A SANATORIUM.”

    “Write AN EPIC POEM about LOST KEYS set in A FAST FOOD KITCHEN.”

    I wrote my fair share of these generators.  The code behind them was simple: a couple data arrays chock full of verbs and nouns and settings and styles, a random number generator, and some user interface bits. It was all coding spare change compared to the corporate-billion budgets of modern AI systems that barf out polished gems of inspiration that could never match the lightweight brilliance of a digital dice roll.

    Creativity, I think, often emerges from serendipity. Something amazing and unique can tumble out of our brains when we trigger those brains with curious nonsense.

    I have asked AI for ideas, nudged it to brainstorm, and it comes back with clever concepts, sure. But none of it stacks as a trigger for the weirdest flights of my imagination compared to the raw random indulgence of a simple idea generator.

    I think maybe the more we extract ourselves, remove our humanity, from the process the more boring the final result—and rolling dice, digital or otherwise, is just random enough to preserve our involvement in the loop.

    Try my randomizer:

    When a local politician discovers a sentient plasma core hidden in the playground, everything they believed is put to the test.

  • Past Present

    Over and over I stumble across advice for creativity.  Heck, it’s the basis of this writing project, isn’t it? Here’s what has worked for me, for others, for everyone else in the past, present and certainly will do in the future, too.

    Right?

    And the smart money, the guy who wants this site to be successful and to captivate you and to hold your attention would tell you that there are answers buried inside if you read deeply enough.

    The honest guy would tell you that creativity is just like any other job. You get out what you put in, and the effort pays off when you do the work.

    The fuzzy spaces between, though, are filled with an endless doubting void that slurps up every bit of advice, superstition, ritual, inspiration, and randomness distilled from the universe as possible.

    I’m just the guy sitting here telling you to embrace that uncertainty.

    Look at the advice.

    But also find your own way.

    Do the work.

    But embrace the chaos.

    Dig into ideas that shift your mind, body, and soul to new perspectives.

    But ride the efforts of a billion people who have gone this way before you.

    Under the category of Past & Present, I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • No Dice

    Among the first question I assume you have asked (or wanted to ask) of anyone attempting to write a daily mini-essay (like this) is where do all the ideas come from?

    It’s no easy thing to think of something reasonably new and at least a little interesting to write about every day.  I will admit that, sure, I only post five days a week, Monday to Friday, but still: that is about twenty posts per month, and at least four thousand words spread across around five entries uploaded like clockwork each weekday.

    Brainstorming is key.

    I have written in the past about going for walks with a notepad, or sitting at the window in the cafe pondering the world while I wait for the sparks of imagination to ignite.  This month I tried something new: story dice[1].

    If you are a creative writer no doubt you’ve seen these, maybe even own these. Dice with pictograms on the side that are meant to help authors come up with fictional story plots.  But here’s the thing: I have found, strangely enough, that the little icons on each face of each die is abstract enough that rolling three or four fresh cubes gives just the right boost to my imagination, primed by the topics of this project, to spark a few solid ‘X meets Y in the context of Z’ points into my digital brainstorming notebook.

    In fact, at least a dozen of the posts you’ll likely read in April spawned out of this random rolling of inspirational fate. So I suppose then that ideas, with the right tool and mindset, can come from pretty much anywhere.