Growing your seed
The process of inflating a narrative out of a seed idea may happen more-or-less automatically for you. But there are some ideas we can use to direct our attention to help the process or to take an initial summary and start fleshing it out.
Why
Why did this seed catch my attention? Did it evoke a memory or emotion? Did it provoke me to take a stand for or against some idea or issue? Our answers will reveal our motivation for making this piece.
Searching for answers to these questions cause us to introspect, and when we find the core of our interest we have a powerful basis for interesting or provoking our reader.
Nuts and bolts
Your narrative will require some basic elements. If you're having trouble getting a hold on 'the story' that will communicate the experience you revealed with the why questions, identifying these components of a narrative can help you proceed.
- Narrator
- Character(s)
- Scene(s)
- Time frame
- Critical event(s)
- Critical character interactions
Tools for generating story seeds
Here are some useful links for suggesting new stories.
Wikipedia as a source of story seeds
Wikipedia as a source of story seeds
Random generators
There are other kinds of random generators at the bottom of these pages.
Random words - This will generate 1 or more random words.
Random sentence - This will generate 1 or more random sentences.
Other seed generation sources
- Found Phrases
- Word Paring
- Dreams
- Starting from an opinion
- Starting from a conflict
- Project Gutenberg
- Build on a metaphor
Free Kahn Academy/Pixar Storytelling Class
Additional reading
Creating a picture book
This leads into the ideas we'll explore in later classes about integrating the text with other book content.
The surprisingly complex principles of a successful picture book
Of frames and pages
More information to aid our discussion of blending written and visual content.
