How to Increase Your Stock of Riddles (Verbs)

(1) Introduction

For riddles, it is important to have a large stock of puns. The more stock you have, the more options you have when creating riddles, which leads to making quick, interesting, and clever works.

For example, here is a riddle by Nezutchi:

As expected of Nezutchi. That's clever.
While it is certainly important to add this to your own stock, this only increases your stock by one. Since you've come this far, let's increase your stock even more.

(2) How to create

1. Decide on a model riddle

This time, we will use 'What is 'running away' like? It's like coffee with lots of sugar. The answer is: you don't want to let it escape (you don't want it to be bitter).' as our model.

2. Break down the pun by part of speech to clarify the structure

From the above, we can see that it has the following structure:

3. List verbs with the same conjugation as the structure in 2

The 'Part of Speech Classification' in Weblio Dictionary is useful.

(Please let me know if there are other useful tools)

Opening the sa-row godan conjugation section will show a huge number of verbs.

4. Find puns among the listed verbs

Add 'nai' to each verb that appears and look for ones that become an adjective stem + 'sa'.
Example: Adding 'nai' to 'mikaesu' (to look back) becomes 'mikaesanai', but it doesn't become a pun.
→×
Example: Adding 'nai' to 'karasu' (to wither) becomes 'karasanai'. This becomes a pun with 'karasanai' (not spicy).
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Repeating the above process, I found the following puns:
Karasanai (not wither / not spicy)
Kowasanai (not break / not scary)
Amasanai (not leave over / not sweet)
Kurasanai (not live / not dark)
Toosanai (not let pass / not far)
Wakasanai (not boil / not young)
Nagasanai (not flow / not long)

5. Refine the riddle using the puns created in 4

If you create riddles using the top three from the above, they will look like this.

• What is like a child's curry and a morning glory in summer vacation? The answer is: you must make sure not to let it get spicy (not to let it wither).

• What is like demolition work and a haunted house? The answer is: you have to break it (you have to scare them).

• What is like black coffee and eating everything served to you? The answer is: you must make sure not to leave any sweetness (not to leave any leftovers).

(3) Explanation

By using this method, you can obtain a large stock of riddles from just one. It takes effort, but I think the rewards are worth it. As a personal aside, because I was able to build a stock of "sweetness," "spiciness," and "bitterness" through the analysis above, it has become very easy to create food-related riddles.
Not limited to this example, when you find a clever riddle, look up the same parts of speech in their inflected forms and squeeze every last bit of value out of them!