Generate intriguing writing and drawing prompts with Character, Setting, and Plot spinners! My daughter Ellie and I brainstormed a bunch of ideas. The items we put on the spinners are mysterious, frightening, and outright weird. Chances are the prompt you spin will be more silly than scary—the ridiculousness makes it fun!
Give the spinners a try at this link (click the Spin All button).
I made a template in Google Slides that has instructions, a link to the spinners, blanks for recording the prompt, and space to write. The last slide is blank, and it’s for an illustration. Make a copy of the template by clicking the Use Template button.
Students can learn to draw spooky things with shapes in the Shapegrams below. If you’re not already a member, it’s cheap and easy to become one. 
Spooky Computer Generated Illustrations
What’s scarier than drawing your own illustrations? Asking an artificial intelligence to generate them for you! Craiyon and DALL•E 2 are A.I. systems that create art from the text you enter. They are far from perfect illustrators. In fact, their creations are usually bizarre.
I input some prompts I got from spinning the Spooky Story wheels. Check out the results.
an obnoxious owl at a party only for ghosts lost a magic wand generated by Craiyon
a whiny witch kissed a frog while riding a broom generated by Craiyon
a weird wolf midnight at the cemetery forgot to say goodbye generated by DALL•E 2
clumsy monster at the costume shop found an enchanted mirror generated by DALL•E 2
3 thoughts on “Spin a Spooky Story”
Very interesting! Incidentally, about 20 years ago I created thestorystarter.com.
Joel
Joel, your story starter website is do much fun! I’m having a great time clicking again and again and again!
Here’s one prompt that was generated from your site: “The questionable dentist composed a song in the garage to confuse the investigator.”
I put this into DALL•E 2 and here’s one of the pictures it produced.