The Dan Brown Plot Generator

By Chris Wilson

Sept. 14, 2009

After writing three tone-deaf, best-selling novels featuring Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, Dan Brown has occasionally been accused of being formulaic. To test that charge to the breaking point, we built a Mad Libs-style blurb generator for Brown's next several hundred books.

The idea was to work in as many variables as possible so that each random scenario was highly different from the previous one. An XML file contains all the variable words and phrases, which were crowd-sourced to bored Slate editors. The Flash widget randomly selects from the file of all possible phrases to make a unique blurb. At least as unique as a Brown plot.

Originally ran in Slate