Randomly generated narrative

[N Didicher]

I'm sharing a playful and recurring in-class activity I added to a 4th-yr seminar in English literature course focused on Queer YA romance novels & meeting once per week:

- after we discussed the wide range of human possibilities when it comes to gender, sexual orientation, and romantic attachments, I had the class use dice to randomly generate individual characters for a novel (I'm also a D&D dungeon master, so creating a character sheet was easy)

-  I put students together into small groups and had them think about how their characters might relate to each other and choose a genre of fiction (horror, murder mystery, realist, fantasy, science fiction, etc.; I especially enjoyed the story set in a veterinarians' hospital that served fantasy creatures)

- when I asked if they wanted to return to this activity in later classes, the response was "we must!"

- they developed the plots of their narrative with occasional randomized interventions, and sometimes I managed to connect it to the literary tropes and devices we'd been studying that week

- the challenge in this activity was that some group members would be absent in any given week; I'll address this next time by saving their work in a private online space in the LMS so that absent group members can keep up to date and add comments and suggestions