Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Evil Overlord Plot Generator for writers who need to get some action into their works has been automated. Follow the link below to get a kind of I Ching reading for your sf story, ideas and elements and restrictions that come together to spur your plot. I just can't stop hitting reload.
I figured that if I could teach the students some low cheap tricks for coming up with plots, it would give them something to work with while Jim was teaching them how to do it for real. Unfortunately, I later mislaid all my notes except for the introduction, so I'm not sure what I told them.
Here's the introduction: "Plot is what maintains a decent separation between the front cover and the back cover of a book. Story is what gives the readers the incentive to read all the pages in order. Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature. And now that we've got that out of the way…"
I recall telling them some basic moves, like how you can get away with hokey crap a lot better if the story's moving fast and other cool things are happening, and how you can make two or three half-baked ideas look deceptively substantial by using them in combination. I fear I may have told them–this is like remembering what you said last night at the party–that it counts as originality if you try to do an outright imitation of some other writer but get it so wrong that no one can tell that's what you were trying to do.
(via Making Light)
