Ideas & planning · Tip 10 of 82 · 4 min read
Roll a Story: Prompts and Story Dice
Let chance pick your hero, place and problem, then see what story you can make.
What if you didn't have to choose? A prompt is a little nudge, like a first line or a picture, that gets you started. Story dice let chance do the choosing, and you do the imagining.
Make your own story dice
You don't need special dice. Use one normal dice and three lists of six. Roll once for each list.
- Who: 1 a pirate, 2 a robot, 3 a nervous dragon, 4 a dinner lady, 5 a talking cat, 6 you
- Where: 1 a submarine, 2 a museum at night, 3 a cloud, 4 a supermarket, 5 a desert island, 6 a tree house
- Problem: 1 something is stolen, 2 a storm is coming, 3 someone is lost, 4 a secret gets out, 5 a spell goes wrong, 6 it's a race
A nervous dragon, a supermarket, a storm is coming. Gruff the dragon only went in for a loaf of bread. Now the thunder is rumbling, and every time he gets scared, he sneezes fire. Aisle five is already toast.
Odd mixes make the best stories
The fun of dice is that they give you things that don't seem to go together. Don't re-roll because it's tricky! Ask yourself: how could this possibly work? Your answer is the story.
Other quick prompts
- First-line prompts: "Nobody believed me about the goat."
- Object prompts: grab three random things from a drawer and put them all in one story.
- Word prompts: open a book at any page, point to a word, and use it in your title.