I recently published an article with Our Write Side about How to Recharge Your Creative Battery. Below is a snippet explaining how to use my newest free download.
In my “real life,” I’m the Creative Director at a creativity competition for kids called US Academic Triathlon. For the past 16 years, I’ve been developing activities to foster team work and out-of-the-box thinking in Middle School children (primarily in Minnesota). I also have five years of museum program development experience, including designing crafts to inspire a love of science in visitors of all ages.
Writing about creativity always gets my creative juices flowing! Writing the “Recharge” article inspired me to make a craft project for writers. More are soon to follow, so follow this blog if you want to collect them all.
Download as a PDF: PhoebeDarquelingBrainstormingDice1
Play with them right away, or wait until you’re ready to seriously get back to writing. Either way, I think you’ll have fun making and using these dice and generating ideas. Even if all you do color, your brain will get that nice little “buzz,” and that’s the recharge taking effect. Here’s few ways you could use the dice I’m providing:
Idea #1 – Find Your Fun
Stuck for where to start looking for your next distraction? Roll the dice and choose the word the interests you most at the moment. Use it as a keyword in a search on the internet or library catalog.
Idea #2 – Change Something
Make a list of books, movies, and other stories that you know well. The longer the list, the more chances you will have to play. Go down the list and roll at least one of the dice to reveal a descriptor word. Think about how you could reimagine the themes, characters, and plot of the original story to fit that word. If you roll more than one die, repeat the exercise for each word or try to combine them both into your mash-up. Don’t worry about trying to come up with “good” ideas at this point. You may want to record all of your ideas, just the ones that speak to you, or none of them at all.
Idea #3 – Start from Scratch
Roll all three dice and use the combination of descriptors to imagine a new story. Re-roll or remove any dice you feel like discarding.
Idea #4 – Design Your Own
Now that I’ve come up with the idea, I can’t seem to stop thinking of other ways to use dice for story building. I’ll be posting other sets with other prompts soon, such as archetypes and story types based on Save the Cat! by Black Snyder. Even so, I encourage you to go out and make your own! There are also tons of other sizes and shapes of blank dice patterns out there if you want to make your own, and you can apply this mode of brainstorming to any set of related concepts.
If you give them a try or come up with another way they help you be creative, we’d love to hear about it in the comments. Do you have another way to recharge? You could always brainstorm a list!
Phoebe Darqueling 