I asked friends of mine to send me voice memos describing by memory, the plot of their favoritie movie.
Voice memo by voice memo, I played each recording into otter.ai and it transcribed all of my collected voice memos from friends. A lot of words were inaccurate and added a different dynamic to the narative. I placed all of the texts together into one document.
I copied and pasted that document of all of the texts into charNG which generated a new story by mixing the individual recounted ones together. I saved three different generations and selected lines that I liked from each of them. The word 'stick bug' and 'motel' appeared many times and thus the setting and title of the narrative was born.
I copied and pasted those selected lines into N+7 and picked out new words and sentences that appealed to me from all of the different iterations. This was meant to add on more narrative possibilities into the exisiting document. Types of birds would appear throughout the generations like the magpie as well as the word 'crank'.
When my friends would talk about their chosen film, specific character names would be said. Instead of using these existing and popular characters in the the new narrative,I inputed names such as Ophelia, Marion Crane and Norman Bates and received many anagrams. I picked out ones that could sound like names, even if they were a bit goofy. Halo Pie, Mr. Ocean Rain, and Mr. Tana Bones became the three magpies that Miss Crank take care of.
I was going through the different "poetry" voices in botnik.org and it made me think about the contemplation of life in terms of a timeline and how we as human beings fall within this constructed timeline. I know, all of a sudden it gets so weirdly intimate, but I think those feelings are underlying the main character's determination to get the job. Miss Crank quotes her favorite author, Ocean Rain, which is taken directly from the predicitive text generator.
Instead of trying to focus so heavily on the significances of life, Miss Crank teaches the main character how to take a step back from that spotlight.
The search was indeed in progress, and the goal the character had in mind might have not been fulfilled, but a new meaning was found through this progress.
The start of any new thing requires some form of courage. It take a lot of courage to keep moving forward, but at the same time, it takes a lot of courage to fall back.
This prompt especially helped during the process of going beyond the intital narrative. I was stuck for a bit because I didn't know how to work with the original words and formulate a story out of it, and so going through the word generator programs helped.
I intepreted this as taking a step back from the details and see what can come out of the bigger picture. It was hard at first when it didn't seem like the words flowed well with each other, but I realized that there are other ways to interpret narrative from a different perspective or side.