Story Starter Cards

One prompt per card, six cards a page

Each card carries a single sentence designed to be picked up and written from immediately. Print, cut, and put them in a tub.

Four themes: adventure, fantasy, everyday, or a mixed set that takes four prompts from each. Twelve prompts per theme, and asking for more than twelve cards cycles through them again — which is what you want when a class of thirty needs one each and duplicates are fine.

Why a single sentence

Because the blank page is the problem, and a long prompt replaces it with a comprehension exercise.

A prompt that runs to a paragraph has already made the decisions — who, where, what is at stake — and leaves the writer filling in around somebody else's story. One sentence gives a starting position and nothing else, which is the smallest push that works.

The everyday theme is the underrated one

Adventure and fantasy prompts get picked first and produce the most enthusiastic writing, which is genuinely valuable for a reluctant writer.

They also produce a lot of dragons. Everyday prompts — a surprise at breakfast, something found on the way to school — are harder, because the writer cannot lean on the genre and has to make an ordinary situation interesting. That is closer to what most writing actually demands, and it is where a class that has been writing about pirates for a term should go next.

Running it

Draw at random rather than choosing. Half the benefit of a prompt is that it was not selected — a child who picks their own card will pick the one closest to what they were going to write anyway.

Set a time rather than a length. Ten minutes of writing produces more than "write half a page", which turns into a word-count exercise with large handwriting.

And let them ignore the prompt after the first sentence. It is a starting pistol, not a specification, and a story that runs away from its card is the ideal outcome.

Other uses for the same cards

Speaking practice, where the card is talked from rather than written from. Two cards at once, with the challenge of using both. A card drawn at the start of a lesson and written from for five minutes, every day, which is one of the more reliable ways to make writing routine rather than an event.

On the form

A title, the theme, and how many cards (1 to 60). A4 or US Letter.

Print on card if the set is going in a tub for the year. Print at 100% so the cards cut evenly.