Creativity Experiment: Rory's Cubes & PiBoIdMo Report for Nov. 5th

Day two of Pre-PiboIdMo, guest blogger Marcie Colleen, shared some of her picture book idea tips and tricks. One of those ideas was Rory's cubes, story cubes to get your imagination roaring.

 

So, lets get down to the nitty gritty of it and look at how to use Rory's Cubes as a starting point for some hopefully fantastic picture book ideas.

Rory's Cubes consists of 9 dice each with six pictographs that you must roll then connect with a story based on the pictographs the dice show. There are different rules on how to connect the pictographs, and the Rory's cube website has different instructions you can use. OR you can make up your own rules? As far as I can tell there are no hard and fast rules to play with Rory's Cubes.

Let's play a sample game. I'll be using the  app version of the game with the original method of playing Rory's Cubes as illustrated in the video below:




Playing with the Original  Cubes, I shook my device and got this:

Which I arranged into this order to form the story below (Obviously, this is not one of my PiBoIdMo ideas just an example of game play to draft a picture book; a draft in in sore need of editing/rewriting!):

The Cubes:

The Story:

There was once a boy that had a very mischievous shadow. The shadow would throw his voice to make it sound like he was in other rooms when he wasn't. The Shadow would also make fart and burp noises in geography class that would get the boy into trouble. 

The worst thing of all this very naught shadow would do is run around at night when the boy was sleeping and would lock and unlock all the doors, and windows, opening and closing them keeping the whole house awake. 

The boy didn't know what to do because you can't get rid of your own shadow and it was his shadow... Or was it? 

The boy asked his grandmother and the grandmother told him of a legend about when shadows get mixed up. The only way to fix a mixed up shadow is to follow it to where it goes when you're not looking and that will be it's true shadow source. 

So the little boy pretended to go to sleep and just like every other night the shadow wandered off, only this time the little boy followed him. And where did the shadow lead him? Why, to a leprechaun! no wonder that shadow was so mischievous. 

Leprechauns like all magical creatures are naturally mischievous so it would make sense that a shadow of a leprechaun would be equally mischievous.  Being distracted by his own shadow the little boy easily captured the Leprechaun.

Everyone knows what happens when you catch a leprechaun...You get his pot of gold. 

But the little boy didn't want the Leprechaun's pot of gold. Nope! He wanted HIS shadow back. 

So the Leprechaun and the boy came to an agreement. instead of giving the little boy his pot of gold the Leprechaun and the boy traded back their shadows.

The Verdict

Rory's cubes can a fun way to come up with a story. They can be a bit challenging so I wouldn't expect to have a great story right off the bat. I could see it as another tool in your story crafting tool kit, but not the only tool in your tool box. You could use Rory's cubes or Google for Printable story cubes for a DIY approach. I personally liked Rory's cubes because as an App I can take them everywhere I take my phone and there is no mess or fuss involved. It's great for generating stories on the go, or just to play with children.

My PiBoIdMo Ideas Report -- Nov. 5

And now a report on how PiBoIdMo is going for me:

Pre PiBoIdMo: 33 Picture book Concepts--Didn't know I had this many until they were together in one place!
November 1: 7 Picture book Concepts
November 2: 1 Picture book Concept --- Saturday I had a lot going on...one new idea isn't bad.
November 3: 5 Picture book Concepts
November 4: 4 Picture book Concepts
November 5: 9 Picture book Concepts *none are from Rory's Cubes maybe tomorrow?
Total: 59 Picture book Concepts

 That number may seem high but I started collecting Picture book ideas a month and a half before November. In addition, I keep every idea; no matter how good or bad, since ideas can evolve or influence other ideas later on. For me, it's important I keep record of them all good or bad. For PiBoIdMo this year I'll take the top 30 ideas and polish those. The remainder will stay in a morgue file that I can visit as needed in the future.
 
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