The Story Box: What It Is And Why You Need One

Hello, everyone! Welcome to this month's installment of the Literary Love email. Today, I want to share with you all one of my favorite methods for coming up with story ideas: the Story Box.

It's a pretty simple method, but one that has helped me come up with some of my favorite book concepts, and one that I find super fun.

Without anymore rambling, on my part, lets dive right on in!

What Is A Story Box?

I'm so glad you asked! The Story Box is basically a method of coming up with novel concepts by combining and meshing together small ideas to form a larger, book sized concept. You have a box full of paper slips with smaller aspects of story scribbled onto them. When you need a story concept, you can go to the Story Box and let your brain try connecting the seperate elements into a story that ties them all together.

My twin and I like to close our eyes and pick four slips at random to see what immerges, but you can pick through each one and set aside the ones you feel will combine to make a story.

Step One: What You Need:

#1: Cut up pieces of paper (you could use sticky notes, index cards scrap paper, etc.)

#2: Some container to store the papers in (I use a box, but you can use a ziploc bag or something else)

#3: Highlighters + the pen of your choice

#4: An imagination!

Step Two: Define Your Categories

As you can see from the picture above, the next thing I did was define my categories. Basically, I came up with several core elements to a novel concept, then assigned them to a specific highlighter's color.

You can come up with whatever categories fit your stories the most (if you're a fantasy writer you might include magic system ideas) but to give you some ideas, here is a more in depth look at the categories I chose to include so far:

#1: External Character: Things like the protagonists interests, quirky facts, their parent's job, what they want to be, etc.

#2: Character Arc/Theme: Pretty self explanatory, but here you can include things like what a character's Lie or Truth might be, or a certain theme you want to explore.

#3: Elements: This is my random section. It incudes things like character voice, the books POV, or any element the book has that can't be put into the other categories.

#4: Plot: This can include things like how the book opens or ends, a certain situation. This is where anything related to the external plot goes.

#5: Setting/Time: As someone who tends to write stories set in different time periods, this one a good category to have. It's quite fun to try to coming up with some unqiue places to set the story in.

Step Three: Let The Ideas Begin!

This, in my opinion, is the best part. Now that you've gathered your supplies and defined your categories, it's time to actually start writing your ideas down! Scratch down on your paper those little nuggets of ideas, then highlight them according to what category they are. You can do dozens of them in one day, or slowly add in an idea here and there as the weeks and months pass along. Soon, you'll have a box (or bag!) full of little ideas to sort through whenever you're in need of book ideas. For some inspiration, I've included some pictures of my own papers and some of the combinations. Please do not mind the messy scrawl - they are jotted down ideas, after all :)

Now It's Your Turn!

How do you come up with story ideas? Do you think you'll try out the Story Box method? What kind of categories do you think you would include? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!