What follows is a collection of generative devices to use for writing which is not narrative based. The arbitrary rules of these games have also been used by serious writers to produce ideas for poems and stories - some examples are given below. The rules of many of these creative games can be translated into computer code to produce what might be called para-literature . These games are fun - try them.
Most people think of anagrams as frivolous fun.
But they have been used for serious purposes. Here is a short religious poem by the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert inspired by an anagram. Palindromes are sentences or lines that read the same forward and backward. Lawrence Levine wrote a palindromic novel of 31,957 words, Dr. Awkward and Olson in Oslo in 1986. Each line reads the same forward and backwards.