vocabulary

Another way to generate text #2: “backmasking” (now with bonus Batman/Beatles content)

As I mentioned in my last post (“The Spell Check Technique”), I’ve played around with more than a few means for generating text. Another one that I used when writing Giant Slugs is a trick that I somewhat jokingly called “backmasking.” Here’s how it works:

  1. Write a sentence or the start of a sentence.

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Craft Notes / 18 Comments
May 17th, 2012 / 8:01 am

Another way to generate text #1: “The Spell Check Technique”

[Update 26 June 2012: At my personal blog, I’ve put up another demonstration of this technique.]

When I was younger and wanted to write but was less sure of my own inspiration, I liked inventing processes that would generate text for me. The most useful technique I devised was something I called “the Spell Check Technique.” These days I don’t really use it anymore, so I thought I’d set it down here in case others would like to pick it up.

For this technique you need a text editor with spell check capacity (I’ll demonstrate it using Microsoft Word 2003), plus some text. It doesn’t really matter what the text is.

Let’s start with a good chunk of lorem ipsum (generated through this website). (Note that you can use any starting text you like; I’m using lorem ipsum just for this example.)

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Craft Notes / 46 Comments
May 14th, 2012 / 8:01 am