Make it Visual: Brainstorming Story Ideas by Bryce Barraza

If you’re like me, before you can craft a personal story, you kind of need a story idea. But what if you’re short on ideas? The good news is you have plenty of ideas –you just need to spark your memory to find them! 

Below are a couple of activities and templates that can help you spark memories and document story ideas. Making your ideas visual helps you better reflect on the sequence or location of events, critical crossroads within life, and potential characters of a story idea.

Crossroad Decision Tree

In the book, The Power of Personal Storytelling, Storyteller Jack Maguire offers the ‘Crossroads’ documentation activity. This activity helps identify turning point events or decisions that may have altered your life. The turning points events could represent changes that resulted in positive, negative or a combination of outcomes. This activity initially anchors your mind at a point in time –your age – or ‘when’ an event may have occurred. After brainstorming the turning points, you can then reflect on the characters involved in your life during the event, the resulting sequence of events, and the environment in which a decision or event took place.

For example, when I was 16 years old, my family decided to move from California to Phoenix, Arizona. Upon reflection, the decision was not exactly mine – it was my parents’. Although I have my perspective and understanding as to why we moved, as an adult, I may also want to ask my parents for additional insight as to why they made the decision. This event also introduced a slew of new characters in my life. Immediately following this turning point of moving to a new state, I was enrolled into a new high school and met my two best friends. The memories of this event – how the decision was made, what events happened after the move and the new characters that entered my life – can be the start of a story idea!

Where does your decision tree lead you? Feel free to try the activity using the template in the image at the top of the post!

Comments

[Dee Dee]

Thanks for sharing this idea, Bryce. I am going to try it because I am always struggling with ideas for personal stories.