So I haven’t been posting on Big Bang Poetry for a while. My other blog kind of blew up and took over the end of last year.

But I’ve been saving up some posts for this blog. This year I have cut back my day-job hours in order to have more time for writing projects. I also embarked on a challenge with a friend of mine who hasn’t been writing as much as she’d like. I thought if we could gamify the writing of a short story, it would help encourage writing time on her side and help me get out of my truth/fiction dichotomy over on my side.

So I located two sets of storytelling game cards last year, The Storymatic and Synapsis (both from Storymatic Studios).

(For Christmas my friend Natalie also gave me Ouisi cards which have a storytelling component to them and I’m using those separately this year).

Anyway, I composed some new game rules to bring the two games together (The Storymatic and Synapsis) but my friend unfortunately had a personal issue come up this month and she won’t be able to join in with the first story.

I decided to continue on and thought it would be interesting to mark out the process and progress here. Feel free to join in with the challenge if you feel so compelled.

The main point of the cards is to not overthink your ideas, to instead just blurt it out. You can overthink it plenty later.

Step one was to pull one pink card to get our story theme (or milieux it seems more like) and three gray and blue cards to assemble an opening sentence.

So our pink card sets us up in a young adult novel. Since this is a short story, that just means our main character should be a young-adult character. Mine is named Gerald and he’s 13.

We use the cards on the right to string together a first sentence. Mine turns out to be: “As a whistleblower, Gerald looked more like a ceasefire.” (Gives Gerald a little bit of character there,)

Then we pulled some “Ask” cards to help further define our story:

  1. What happens in the scene of your first sentence: Gerald is trying to report some offenses of the French teacher to the school principal and he backs down and ends up defending him instead.
  2. When/where does the story take place: 1980s suburbs in the general U.S.
  3. What does the main character want more than anything: the love and respect of all the girls, or a girl (whichever comes first).

Then we pull four more cards: two gold cards are to further define the character’s wants or desires, the other two copper cards give us the obstacles our character must face in the story as he works toward getting what he wants.

So besides girls, Gerald also wants to become a future president as well as a person who says yes to everything. (Pretty good goals as they go but I can already tell Gerald is the kind of person who rarely says yes to anything).

A fever and a frozen slice of his Uncle’s wedding cake will have to thwart him on his journey to happiness.

We get two months to write a short story with these guideposts.

Here we go…