In the twenty-first century, combinatorial grammar left the lab and became a popular craft. Browsers and open-source tools put the same recombinant techniques — vocabularies, rules, and substitution — into the hands of poets, game designers, and hobbyists. Story Grammar sits squarely in this tradition.
Nick Montfort's 10 PRINT study and his teaching of generative methods reframed recombinant text as a serious computational art practice, tracing it back to the eras covered here.[1] The genre acquired textbooks, journals, and a critical vocabulary.
Kate Compton's Tracery (2015) reduced context-free grammar generation to a JSON object of rules, making expansion-based text generation accessible to non-programmers and powering a wave of creative bots.[2] Story Grammar's rule-and-modifier model follows the same lineage.
Darius Kazemi's National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo), begun in 2013, challenges participants to write code that writes a 50,000-word novel — an annual showcase of grammars, Markov chains, and procedural text.[3] Generative bots flourished on the open social web and on platforms like Cheap Bots Done Quick.
"Spend the month writing code that writes a novel." — NaNoGenMo, est. 2013
Even as large language models came to dominate, rule-based generators kept their place for the same reasons the Oulipo prized constraint: they are transparent, controllable, and reproducible. Story Grammar (2024–2026) continues the line — a small, auditable combinatorial grammar for narrative projects, the latest entry in a story that runs back to Mallarmé's dice.[4]