March Street Press
Meta4

Copyright © 1997 March Street Press
It is difficult to get started sometimes. You need a phrase, a word, a paradigm, to get your mind in the right place. As any geometer knows, the place from which you start and the angle of your attack determine your destination. How to begin?

Many writers begin with nonsense. Many also end up with nonsense, but we’ll leave those poor scribblers alone.

Nonsense can take many forms--reading the telephone book, automatic writing, opening a Bible to a random page, and so forth. March Street Press has developed its own nonsense generator, known as Meta4, which generates 12 similes which you are free to use, either as starting points, or in the course of your own writing.

Each time you click the Generate button, you will add a fresh set of similes to the list.

Why call it Meta4 when it generates similes? You ask too many questions. Click the Generate button:

This simile generator uses a word list I created from a concordance of Arial by Sylvia Plath (I created the concordance, too, just for the fun of it). Originally, it was part of a poem generator I called Psychoplath. If I am feeling very ambitious, I might recreate Psychoplath in Java for this Website. If that would please you, write to let me know.

If Meta4 creates a particularly amusing or profound simile for you, I’d love to hear about it. I hope you find Meta4 as useful as a placenta humming a teaset.