Story cubes — a fun method for your creative writing

About a year ago, I took two courses on Domestika, on creative technologies and copywriting.

The teachers were working (or have been working) in advertising agencies.

It became instantly clear they knew what’s what, and I had so much to save, screenshot, and write that I didn’t know what to grab first.

Among other methods, I found this one fun.

What are these story cubes?

That.

Physical cubes with an object on each side. You randomly roll the dice, pick three(or more if you’re wild), and write a story of the size of what fits in a tweet, with the three objects. You can write more than that if you’re inspired.

The whole point of this is to start the timer, and within 2 minutes, or 5 minutes if you need more time, make sure you write something.

The guy in the course implied it’s ideally 2 minutes because you want to train your brain to think faster. Even if it’s words that don’t make any sense, or it sounds like a 10-year-old writing.

Doesn’t matter.

He did this so we’ll understand that good writing comes from bad writing, instead of waiting for the perfect idea to hit your delicate forehead.

When I practiced writing these stories, I took the words from a previous brainstorming method I just tried, because I didn’t have cubes, and the whole point was to make these short stories with words from the concept I was already creating.

So it just made more sense for me to do it like this.

My concept was about my city, which is constantly improving and under construction.

I came up with a campaign idea for an app that would make traffic easier by notifying people where the roads are blocked daily.

Then I wrote 5 stories, and then another 5, switching narrators.

I’ll put here 2 of them.

My words for the first story were: “Alice in Wonderland”, “police officer,” and “holographic displays.”

Julie stopped walking, interrupted by a holographic display that said: Any road is a good road as long as you know where you’re going. The text was followed by a city map with the main directions. The road in front of her was under construction. A police officer was there to guide her to where she wanted to go.

“Speech recognition”, “u turn,”, “maps app”

– Take the suggested route — said Obie while checking to see if the maps app was picking up what he just said. His date — Laura — looked confused. The app guided Obie to the nearest U-turn so that he could turn right onto some street, leaving him with just enough time to say goodbye to Laura.

That’s what I got.

Thanks to him, though, I was able to come up with the concept for my spec campaign, which I plan on starting in the following months. It will be a process.

In case you’re interested, the link to the course is here. Of course, this post is not sponsored.

I’m curious how do you find this method, and what is the thing that gets your creative wheels turning when you’re stuck?

I always love hearing about any sort of writing methods.

D.