Flashy

The other day I spotted a new idea-ology product from Tim Holtz, a mini deck of flash cards:



I bought them because I love all things idea-ology, and I thought they might be useful as story prompts, too. The deck contains 72 1.5" X 2.5" cards with thematic words on both sides:



Each word could be a prompt on its own, but with 104 words to play with you can come up with an infinite number of combinations, too. Here are four I drew at random:



And here are the words that were on the back of those four:



I got them for $4.99, which makes them a very affordable mini deck of inspiration. I think they'd make an excellent stocking stuffer for a writer pal, too.

Story Carding

Long before manga or anime there was Kamishibai, a form of Japanese storytelling with picture cards based on the same practice used by 12th century Buddhist monks who used picture scrolls to teach morality lessons. This is now a popular form of storytelling in schools on this side of the planet, and board versions of kamishibai are even employed by some corporations as a visual management tool.

Back in 2008 I came up with the idea to make character trading cards using Big Huge Labs photo trading card generator, and I've always been interested in cards like as a storytelling tool. If you take the kamishibai approach to creating cards for your story, and use a strong symbolic image, some titles and descriptive sentences, you could card every chapter like this:



Now to show you how that template works with a real story, here are two cards I've made for my NaNoWriMo 2014 novel:





I think this might work as well if not better than index cards, sticky notes or all the other ways we outline stories. You can also do these cards for scenes versus chapters. Also, you can use any card form you like; I just went with Big Huge Labs's card generator because it's easy and the results are attractive.

What do you think of the idea? Let me know in comments.

Story Prompt Cards

I never run short of story ideas, but for writing prompts I usually depend on music, poetry, art or anything random to strike me and start the gears turning. My habit is to wait for it to come to me, and I've always viewed this as a necessary evil, as my interest needs to be seriously engaged by concept before I dive in to investing my writing in it.

To change my habits and step outside my comfort zone, I decide to challenge myself to write some short stories based on a preset collection of prompts. I still wanted a random element involved (mainly to prevent myself from deliberately or subconsciously picking out easy or story-sympathetic prompts), so for that I went to my jar of fortune cookie fortunes -- yes, I save every one I get -- and pulled out twenty slips at random.

To prevent misplacing or losing my 2011 theme fortune, I made it into an artist trading card, something I'm using as my annual art project for this year (more on that at the photoblog here.) I decided to do the same thing with these fortunes and make them into an ATC series. I've named the cards my story prompt deck, and my goal is to pick at least one card at random every month and use it to inspire a short piece of fiction.

It's good writing practice; it's definitely different for me and I'm hoping to get at least one novel idea out of the exercise. The real creative room is in the interpretation of the prompt while (hopefully) remaining faithful to it. I'm not giving myself any limits on length, genre or time period -- during my busy months, I may only be able to write a couple hundred words -- but I do want to tell a complete story for each prompt.

Some of the fortunes are a bit odd, and I don't agree with a couple of them, so I've also given myself permission to flip, twist, and otherwise put my own spin on them. Such as the Fearless courage is the foundation of victory card; I don't buy that at all. The truly fearless don't need courage; they operate on self-assurance, certainty, narcissism or whatever drives their confidence. In my experience the courageous are generally terrified souls, but somehow endure it, plow through it and persist in spite of it. Courage doesn't even exist until you acknowledge that the odds are against you and no matter what you do you're probably going to fail. Fearless people are by their nature incapable of feeling anything like that. When I pull this card I have no doubt I'll write a story that turns it on its head.

If you'd like to create a deck of your own story prompt cards, you don't have to eat Chinese take-out from now until March. Try clipping interesting words and phrases from magazines, newspapers or other printed materials, or gathering some interesting images (faces, objects, landscapes or any other story element would work well.) Write or print out some lyrics to your favorite poems or songs and snip some lines from them, or feed them to Wordle and see what pops up in the cloud. If you'd like less obvious prompting, collect some paint chip cards from your local home improvement store, pick a color at random and use the color name or the color itself in some way in your story.




Related links:

Big Huge Lab's photo trading card generator can help you design and print out some very cool-looking cards.

Creative Writing Prompts.com has 346 story prompts here to help spark ideas; hover your cursor over each number to read them.

Seventh Sanctum has an entire page of writing generators here that range from silly to seriously neat.