I’ve always been a sucker for writing prompts, even though they have a way of sometimes being cheesy, forced, and ultimately silly. But recently I came across this interesting product, a paper-based prompt generator that would seem to strike the right balance of specific detail and vague suggestion. It consists of 500 cards, each one bearing either a character trait, occupation, situation, or object — 125 of each. The idea is simple: you shuffle the cards, draw several of them, and let the information on them guide you into a piece of writing. (They have “rules” for using the set of cards, but they can be ignored or followed at will.) “There are between 900 million and 6.6 trillion combinations of cards in The Storymatic,” the product page claims. “That’s a lot of stories, but there’s one thing missing — a person like you to tell them.” Link.
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