Story Seed Engine

About

The spark is always somewhere else. Story Seed Engine brings it to you.

You're reading an article, a Wikipedia page, a news story. Something catches your eye — a detail, a sentence, a piece of history. You feel the flicker of an idea. Then you open a new tab to write it down, lose the context, and the moment's gone.

Story Seed Engine fixes that. Highlight the sentence that sparked you, right-click, and get five story seeds — tailored to your genre, your POV, your tense — without leaving the page.


HOW IT WORKS

1. Set your draft profile: genre (dark fantasy, thriller, literary fiction, and more), point of view, tense, tone, and any clichés you want to avoid
2. While reading anything online, highlight a passage that interests you
3. Right-click → "Plant a story seed" (or use ⌘⇧P)
4. Five seeds appear instantly in the side panel — Conflict, Character, Setting, Twist, Dialogue
5. Save any seed you love to your Garden with one click


THE FIVE SEED TYPES

CONFLICT — a story premise built around tension or opposition
CHARACTER — a specific, concrete character idea
SETTING — a place or world detail that opens a story
TWIST — a subversion or surprise that reframes what you've read
DIALOGUE — an opening line or conversational premise


YOUR DRAFT PROFILE SHAPES EVERYTHING

Story Seed Engine isn't a generic prompt generator. The seeds it produces match your actual draft:
— Genre-aware: a fantasy writer gets seeds with magic and politics; a thriller writer gets dread and stakes
— Tense-matched: all seeds are written in your draft's tense
— POV-consistent: first person seeds avoid "she thought"; third omniscient opens inward
— Cliché-avoidant: list the tropes you're sick of and they won't appear

Supported genres: Dark Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Literary Fiction, Thriller, Romance, Horror, Sci-Fi, Cozy Mystery, Historical Fiction, Satire, and Other.


YOUR SEED GARDEN

Every seed you save goes to your Garden — a persistent, searchable library that lives with the extension. Your Garden builds over time into a creative resource you can return to at any stage of your draft.

— Organised by seed type (Conflict, Character, Setting, Twist, Dialogue)
— Shows the source text and URL each seed came from
— Export your Garden to Markdown for use in Scrivener, Notion, or any writing app


REQUIREMENTS

Story Seed Engine uses the Anthropic Claude API to generate seeds. You will need a free Anthropic API key from console.anthropic.com. Each seed generation costs approximately $0.003 (less than a third of a US cent). A typical writing research session generating 20 sets of seeds costs around $0.06.

Setup takes two minutes: get a key, open src/config.js, paste it in. That's all.


COMPLETELY PRIVATE (except the API call)

Your draft profile and saved seeds are stored locally on your device. The only data sent externally is the highlighted text you choose to process, sent to Anthropic's API to generate seeds. The extension does not store your highlighted text after seeds are returned. Full details in the Privacy Policy.


PERFECT FOR

— Fiction writers who do research in the browser and want to capture ideas in the moment
— NaNoWriMo participants building a seed bank before November
— Writers who feel stuck and need a prompt that's actually connected to what they're working on
— Anyone who's ever had an idea sparked by reading something online and then lost it


KEYBOARD SHORTCUT

⌘⇧P (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+P (Windows/Linux) — plant a seed from the currently selected text without right-clicking.


NOT FOR

Story Seed Engine generates story ideas from highlighted text. It does not write your story, complete your draft, or generate full passages of prose. It is a creative spark tool, not a ghostwriter.


SUPPORT

Questions, bugs, or feature requests? Use the Support tab on this listing. We read everything.