Story Lines

Write Stronger Stories.

Story Lines is a card set that teaches story structure as you pair random cards. Use it on your own to improve your stories, or as a party game to tell collaborative stories.

The Story Lines card set has been in development for over 20 years. As I studied the structure of stories, I began to prototype these cards to help me plan the stories I wrote.

How you use them is up to you. First and foremost, they can be used to dispel the curse of the Blank Page. Pair a silver Format card with gold Subject card and write a passage using those two cards as a guide. The cards aren't specific to any genre and can be used to tell any story since they focus on structure rather than content.

By using these cards you can learn the language of storytelling, and begin to pick apart the work of your favorite authors. When you use this language of story structure to summarize narrative, it makes it easy to remember those stories later.

• Story State: People, Places, and Things
• Story Change: Events, Actions, and Experiences
• Discourse Time: Present, Past, and Future
• Discourse Frame: Sense, Speech, and Thought

The four Aces of the deck are Storyline cards which relate back to the story as a whole.

There are also 12 Challenge cards. Flip these cards in the air and follow the instructions depending on whether they land Face Up or Face Down.

If you really want to challenge yourself, pair up all 54 cards and write a story that uses every format and subject card.

This is the first edition of the cards and they have a Young Adult/Middle Grade theme. I'm hoping to make more genre-specific sets in the future, so let me know if there's a genre you'd like to see in the future. And visit my website where I'll be writing more about the specific cards and the techniques behind them.