What if writers had VSCo?

Both Instagram and VSCO have come out with filters that are able to imbue photos with a certain aesthetic and feel. But modern technology has yet to advance to a point where we can apply filters to not only images but text as well, and allow lazy amateur writers everywhere to emulate the surface quality traits of their favorite authors and writing styles. We’ve come up with a few such filters, because if there’s anything technology is doing really well now, it’s making everybody feel professional.

The Tylder Durden Explosive Sunrise

Have you ever thought of your writing as too clean, or too tame? Do you fear you live an uninteresting life and wish your writing had a little more blood and piss and nihilism and anarchy in it? Run anything you write through the TDES, and it’ll come out sounding like something Chuck Palahniuk, the modern godfather of grit, would pull out from his entrails. The TDES will reveal your subconscious discontent with the modern condition and all its consumerist tendencies, all the while making you sound cool to power-obsessed, 14-year-old boys everywhere. But be warned! The TDES doesn’t work for sequels, especially if that sequel happens to be Fight Club 2 in graphic novel form.

The Slam Poet

Maybe you’re not only a writer, but a performer, experimenting not just with the meanings and shapes of words but the sounds they make when spoken together. The Slam Poet will automatically specify which parts of your writing require YELLING, WAVING your HANDS a LOT, and even give you a specific point of view on things (!!!), whether it’s about race, gender, even the experience of multicultural displacement! But not love. You’ll always get a general, cookie-cutter view on love from The Slam Poet. This filter will also tell you to follow a certain formula of intonation, because nine out of 10 slam poets, what with their abrupt stops and random injections of rap, sound more or less the same. But that’s cool. At least you’re accessible!

X-Pro 1Q84

Your sadness is not like anyone else’s sadness. It’s a super duper special sadness — so special in fact that your sorrow makes weird, paranormal, supernatural stuff happen. Put anything you write through the X-Pro 1Q84, and, like Haruki Murakami, you too can converse with talking cats, conspire with sketchy sheep-men, and contemplate how depressing it is to watch the fossil of a whale penis hanging from a museum ceiling. Every diary entry becomes the basis of a potential horror flick. Your girlfriend broke up with you? Fish fell from the sky! Your cat went missing? The ghost of a government agent appears before you in a dream! The X-Pro 1Q84 is best enjoyed after a swim, eating spaghetti al dente, or thinking about that mysterious girl you like at the bottom of a deep, dark well. 

The Matt Berninger

The Matt Berninger will just completely erase everything you write and replace it with lyrics by The National. “But wait, I was looking for ways to improve my writing, not erase—” SHUT UP, MAN. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Only Matt Berninger knows. Remember: Everything you love is lost in drawers. See also: the Imogen Heap, Ben Gibbard and Laura Marling extension packs.

The Unforgettifier

One of the incredible things about writing — or any art form, generally — is its inherent sense of transience. Every story and poem you will ever write, no matter if it’s commercially successful and critically acclaimed, will become fading memories, mere wisps of what once were sleepless nights spent by you toiling over and articulating every single thought. The Unforgettifier kind of changes all that. This filter will make sure that anything you write will be remembered verbatim by your readers. Every word, every punctuation mark, every paragraph break, every typo, remembered perfectly. The cool thing about The Unforgettifier is that it will make your writing better by reminding you that the stakes are higher, and that they’ve always been high, and that your words and thoughts will cling like germs to the wrinkles of a stranger’s brain, influencing their actions, rippling through history, until the universe ends by collapsing under the weight of its own gravity. Or until the human race destroys itself through war. Whichever comes first.