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NaNoGenMo 2020
It’s December first, and you know what that means--time to look at the 2020 National Novel Generation Month results!
There’s lots of fascinating things from this year, more than I’ve had time to dig into yet. I’m looking forward to it.
If you want to beat me to it and check them out for yourself, the submissions are in the Issues tab on the GitHub repository:
https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2020/issues
NaNoGenMo 2017
It’s nearly November, which means that it’s nearly time to start making novel generators again!
NaNoGenMo, for those of you who haven’t heard of it, is National Novel Generation Month: spend November writing a thing that writes a novel.
Hundreds of novel generators have been made over the past few years, some of them with quite interesting results.
The way the event itself is organized is by using the Issues system on GitHub as a forum. Just click on the Issues tab and start a thread via “New Issue”.
You don’t need to know anything about Git to participate. People often upload their generators to GitHub because it’s an obvious way to share and archive source code, but you can use whatever you feel like. The only requirements are that you make something that writes 50,000 words and that you share the source code afterwards.
Even if you don’t have time to participate this year, you should check out the resources threads, which have become some of the best compilations of tools and techniques for text generation.
People are already announcing their intent to participate, and it is shaping up to be a banner year for text generation.
https://nanogenmo.github.io/
The Deserts of the West (NaNoGenMo 2015)
Travel novels were one of the trends in last November’s NaNoGenMo. As a genre, travel memoirs combine the jumbled juxtaposition of encyclopedia entries with a recurring rhythm. The overall journey gives the novel order, while the organization by location provides the context. Thus, the genre is a good match for current generate text techniques.
Martin O’Leary’s The Deserts of the West begins, like so many fantasy authors do, with a map. The journey across the procedurally generated maps is described in a style that evokes Calvino’s Invisible Cities, while the title is referenced in the Jorge Luis Borges quote.
Like all travel novels, the information is arranged geographically and temporally, with an entry for each place that’s in the order they’re reached in the journey. The descriptions can be a bit repetitive, but that’s only to be expected in a travel guide, so while it is a limitation, it’s the kind of limitation that fits the book rather than fights against it.
The source code is, of course, available. Or you can dive right into reading the novel.
no people
For NaNoGenMo 2015, everestpipkin composed no people, which I can best describe as a poetry art book.
The generator took images from Google Streetview, performed an image recognition on them, and then wrote poetry based on what it saw in the picture.
The results are astonishingly evocative.
The poetry is written by expanding concepts with Wordnik, finding words that match in random Project Gutenberg texts, and then combining the results in particular ways.
It is presented without capitalization, as is typical of everest pipkin’s work.
The source code: http://ifyoulived.org/no_people.js The complete novel: http://everestpipkin.itch.io/no-people
NaNoGenMo 2015
November is over, and that means that NaNoGenMo is done for this year! While there are still a few stragglers finishing their novel generators late, there are 72 completed projects presently listed. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.6 million generated words.
Some of the projects include: generated news coverage of NaNoGenMo, a Fighting-Fantasy-style procedurally generated gamebook, a procedurally generated jewel heist, a novel based on XKCD #1609, a novel about the github repository that NaNoGenMo was organized at, and a ton of other novels.
I’m sure I’ll be highlighting some of my favorites later, but for now you can read them yourself: https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues?page=1&q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Acompleted
LE Omelette D'ARTHUR (2013)
A novel from the first NaNoGenMo, by Michael Paulukonis. The basic operation is to take two texts and swap the nouns in the first with the nouns in the second. In this case, the two texts are the first volume of Le Morte d’Arthure, and a book about hackers: Underground by Suelette Dreyfus. It’s not the most coherent story, with the new nouns resulting in more of a texture than a sense of place. The result reads like a cyberpunk epic, one that the machines tell each other late at night when only the blinkenlights illuminate the server room.
Word swapping and combining texts still a go-to technique for NaNoGenMo, especially since the choice of input texts greatly affects the outcome, and new algorithms for how the combination is done have produced some nicely sophisticated results.
The novel, and the code repository are available to view, as is the discussion thread from 2013.
I Waded In Clear Water
Speaking of using unusual data sources, here’s a procedurally generated novel based on the interpretation of dreams. Allison Parrish took a 1901 dream dictionary and used sentiment analysis to order them from worst to best, resulting in a gradual journey from a nightmare to a beneficent vision.
I particularly like that the structure of the novel works on both a conceptual level--there’s a strong theme that unifies the work--and as a resulting output. The result, like that of many generators from NaNoGenMo, is more poetic than prosaic, which I think is to its credit. Computers don’t need to be limited to dry utilitarian results.
https://github.com/aparrish/nanogenmo2014
Seraphs
The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious, untranslatable codex that has inspired many artists over the years (including Codex Seraphinianus). For NaNoGenMo 2014, Liza Daly had the delightful idea to generate a new Voynich manuscript.
The result is something that embraces the current limitations of generative processes. Generating something that has both conceptual meaning and moment-to-moment sense is difficult, generating something that verges on making sense while not bothering to conform to the dictates of English is still hard, but more reachable. I think this is a concept worth exploring for your own generators: try making something that makes sense to the machine but doesn’t bother to explain it to the human viewer.
Success at NaNoGenMo is a nebulous, personal concept, but I think Seraph succeeds.
https://github.com/lizadaly/nanogenmo2014
