Organizing Ideas into a DIY Idea Deck!
Not too long ago, I realized that I had random ideas for stories all over the place–in my email, on my phone, on my computer, and in assorted notebooks. While it’s exciting to have so many ideas, it’s really inefficient to have them all over the place.
But then I thought, “hey, self! You like card-based idea generators an awful lot. You could make your own!”
And so I did.
The image with this post is the start of my DIY idea deck. I bought 3×5 index cards in 10 different colors. Then I assigned each color to a different sort of idea. Blue, the biggest section in that stack, is story ideas. I’ve also got colors for character names, places or things, poetry pieces, cool titles, ideas for longer pieces (novels or novellas), and more There’s definitely some overlap between some categories, and the biggest one will forever be that story idea section. But it’s nice to have everything in ONE place, rather than four or more.
Depending on how many cards you anticipate needing, you can also get a small plastic index card box (they used to be used for recipe cards when I was a kid, but I also used a ton of them for writing my papers and thesis in school) or a larger box. I wound up with about a ten inch long box, which is not close to full yet, but it also gives me space to store my blank index cards until I fill them!
I haven’t used my deck yet to generate a story, but I’ve been filling it with tons of ideas, so it’ll be ready for me when I want to brainstorm a new story!
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