InstaWrite

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  What the application looks like.

Inspiration

The month of November is also known as National Novel Writing Month, or Nanowrimo. There is a program called Nanowrimo that encourages writers to write 50,000 words of a story in one month. I am participating this month, and so when I came to this hackathon, creative writing was on my mind and I wanted to create something that will help get those creative juices going. So, I came up with an idea for a creative writing prompt generator, and went from there.

What it does

It gives the user three random words (out of a bank of over 4,000 words) and asks the user to come up with a story idea based on them. First, the user has 30 seconds to write down one sentence describing the premise of their story. Then, the user will have 5 minutes to write a paragraph expanding on that sentence that outlines the plot of the story. It then displays the user's paragraph on the screen and encourages the user to use the paragraph to make a story.

How I built it

I programmed the entire application using Java, and made all of the graphics using Java Swing components. I used Eclipse to write and compile it.

Challenges I ran into

Originally, I wanted the application to be on a webpage, so it could act as a sort of forum where different writers could post the ideas they came up with based on InstaWrite's prompts. However, I had no knowledge of Javascript or CSS, and only minimal knowledge of HTML. I attempted to teach myself Javascript, but ran into issues accessing the document that contained the word bank to choose from. After a couple of very frustrating hours, I decided to make it a standalone application. After that, my main challenge was designing the GUI using Swing. It took a lot of Google searches, but I managed to organize my components in the fashion that I imagined.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am very proud of my working product, as it has a good GUI and works quite well. It has nearly all of the basic functionality that I wanted it to have. I am especially proud of the way I managed to access an online document to choose three random words from. It took a lot of experimentation and I was very happy with the result.

What I learned

As part of this project, I went online and actually taught myself the fundamentals of Javascript. Although I am far from a master of it, I now, at least, have a working knowledge.

What's next for InstaWrite

Next, I hope to take InstaWrite online and turn it into a webpage. I want to allow people to post their work on the webiste, and read works other people have posted, so that it can become a well of strange, unique stories, based on randomly generated words.

Built With

• java