Let the Idea Generation Begin
This week I finally got my hands on the Story Engine Deck! I’ve been waiting for it for two months, and I’m so pleased that it was worth the wait. Ever since I first heard of this prompt generator from writer friends, I knew I had to have it, and that it would help me come up with really interesting story seeds.
The base deck has five types of cards that provide a character, their motivation, their object (called an anchor) and the conflict, plus an adjective card that modifies the other elements. A basic draw, for example, would look like this:
“A colonist wants to unmask the conspiracy of a privately owned nebula but an innocent person will be executed.”
Pretty interesting story seed, yeah? I can already think of several directions to where this particular set of elements could be taken. There are more complicated combinations one could make too, and this was where the deck really helped me this week.
I’d been planning a superhero origin story, and though I have the main character and his motivations mapped out, I still needed ideas about other characters around him. For one, I needed ideas about an important person in their life, one that they would rescue using their newfound powers. So, I did a random draw and got this:
“A poor loyalist who wants to topple the government with an enchanted password and weapon, who in doing so will be taken somewhere they never wanted to go.” To complicate the draw even further, I drew another anchor card and adjective card to further flesh out this weapon/password, and got “an experimental particle”.
Again, so many possibilities! So far I’ve sketched out that this secondary character is some sort of revolutionary who has access to a kill command as it pertains to a secret government weapon that uses some sort of quantum particle, and in the course of doing so, gets captured and imprisoned (“taken where they never wanted to go”). Which fits perfectly with what I needed for my superhero: someone to rescue.
Maybe I just got lucky, but more likely, the Story Engine Deck is the ideal type of tool for me. It helped me unlock some ideas that I can toy around with, and it comes in this really cool packaging too. I’m really excited to see what other seeds it can give me for future stories.
Photos mine.