For today's post, I'd like to bring to all of your attention one of the awesomest writing tools ever created for writing. It is called (la-loo~!) The Storymatic.
The Storymatic was developed by a guy named Brian Mooney, a successful creative writing teacher. It's basically a giant box full of little colored cards. Gold cards have character traits written on them, such as "surgeon" or "amateur boxer" or "subject of a medical experiment." Copper cards have events/situations written on them, like "nobody is watching" or "e-mail that cannot be un-sent" or "this time it's bound to work." If you've encountered (and by encountered, I mean slammed into like a semi-truck carrying bricks) the horrible, terrible, no-good, very-bad thing called writer's block, then all you have to do is pull out one gold card and one copper card and then WRITE! This may not be a cure-all for the injuries you've sustained from the semi vs. block accident, but it's the first step on the way to recovery, for sure.
Alternatively, it can be used as a game, akin to Exquisite Corpse (the one where one person writes a sentence, then the next person must draw a picture of that sentence, then the next person must write what is going on in the previous person's picture, and the person after that must draw a picture of the previous person's sentence and etc), or a teaching tool, or as a prompt maker for visual artists, or just as a thought-provoker. In any case, it is guaranteed to get your creative juices flowing.
I was first introduced to this little box of magic in my Creative Writing class. My reaction was probably along the lines of "OMG MUSTHAVE WANTNOW GIMME." I haven't gotten around to buying it yet, as I've been hoping someone would be kind enough to buy it for me as a gift, but if that doesn't happen by the end of summer, I'll definitely be getting it for myself. It's going at about $30 on the Storymatic website, and as far as I know, that's the only place you can get it. Gah, talking about this makes me want to buy it right now. Must. RESIST! Must. Save. Money!
In any case, as a sort of example of a story that can be brought to life by the Storymatic, here is a "live broadcast" of me, taking a few of the prompts and spending exactly five minutes writing.
Prompts: "neglected sibling," "person who will do whatever it takes," and "can't get down from roof"
Ready? Set? GO!
Sarah crouched on the roof of her house in the middle of a humid, hot, oppresive Wisconsin summer, trying to judge exactly how far of a jump it would be from where she was to the ground. Her father and brother had been up here before, patching a bit of tiling that had gotten damaged in the last big thunderstorm. She'd brought them up some lunch, but then Dad and Michael had both gone down to use the bathroom, and then suddenly, when she'd turned around, the ladder she had used to get up here was gone. Great. This was going to be fun.
"Dad? Mike? I'm still up here you know!"
Nobody answered. They never did. Sarah scrambled her way to the other end of the roof and looked around, just to see if there were any way to get down from over there. She knew that there wasn't-the oak tree in their front yard was the only thing that was taller than their house-but it didn't hurt to look. She considered stomping on the roof to try and get her mom's attention. Mom was probably in the kitchen, cleaning. She cleaned a lot. But that probably wasn't a good idea, as the broken tiles weren't the first problems they'd had with the roof. So Sarah made herself as comfortable as she could and looked up at the blue, cloudless sky, and wondered how long it would be until her family noticed she was missing, or if they would even notice at all.
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P.S. I'm not getting paid to endorse this product (why would I be?). I just wanted to share with all of you. :D
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