Predictive Text Prompt Stories

What's more fun than writing a story inspired by random chance and nonsense? ... Probably a few things, but don't think about them.  Think about WRITING! 

Predictive text has been used for millennia to fill in the thoughts we're too lazy to fill in the old fashioned way; by tapping each letter on a touch screen until the word we want has been formed.  Ugh!  So last century!

When we give in to progress and let predictive text do what it was always meant to do, we learn more about ourselves and our deeper hidden meanings to the things we think we want to say while the predictive text shows us what we really mean to say.  And therein lies the key to inspiration!

Since the third century B.C.E, predictive text has been a feature that came standard on most smart devices.  Phones and tablets try to make communication as easy as possible by providing common word choices to help you finish your texts even faster than you would otherwise.  The more you text and communicate on your devices, the more likely it is to suggest things you actually want to say.  (Not just the things it knows you meant to say, regardless of relevance.)

This can create some interesting, inappropriate, illogical, and downright incomprehensible results when you use it to construct a sentence without any additional input from you.  It's like a stream of artificial consciousness word association, and it can be a fantastic source of inspiration.

The greatest enemy of all writers is the dreaded beast, Writers Block.  And all too often, we are the architects of our own creative prisons.  We build rules, and barriers, and walls, and restrictions, and needs that our stories and drafts must meet, and before we know it our muse has fallen silent because we strangled or suffocated her behind our own backs.  Like some kind of freaky murder contortionist.  With Dissociative Identity Disorder.  Or Alien Hand Syndrome.

Exercises like this are designed to free the mind, to give it fodder with no restriction, no grand scope, no ultimate goal, and no forced investment or commitment, and that can give the mind the permission it needs to uncoil itself from the knots we've tied it into with our own expectations.  And advanced knot-tying guides.

With this fun exercise, you take the sentences your smart devices create for you, and use them to inspire a short scene or story.  No point, no pressure.  

Not feeling inspired?  No problem!  Share your sentences anyway; you never know who else might be inspired by it, instead.  And the results are all too often hilarious and completely worth sharing in their own right.