Brainstorm
Your Story
200 illustrated cards showing characters, creatures, locations, situations. Develop ideas and stories for novels, movies, comic books, TV shows, games, and more. A powerful creative tool for professional storytellers.
Brainstorm
Your Story
200 illustrated cards showing characters, creatures, locations, situations. Develop ideas and stories for novels, movies, comic books, TV shows, games, and more. A powerful creative tool for professional storytellers.
Brainstorm
Your Story
200 illustrated cards showing characters, creatures, locations, situations. Develop ideas and stories for novels, movies, comic books, TV shows, games, and more. A powerful creative tool for professional storytellers
Click the cards to flip them
Tap the cards to flip them
Study the three cards. Look at the title, image, and associations. Jot down whatever ideas for stories, scenes, or characters occur to you. Remember that the card may be interpreted both literally or more associatively. For example, a gun might make you think of an actual firearm or about concepts like violence, self-defense, target practice, or medieval cannons.
Every month we randomly swap out one of these three Narata cards.
200 cards • 10 categories
The Narata deck contains 200 beautiful & professionally designed cards divided into 10 card categories: Character, Creature, Society, Goal, Activity, Situation, Event, Object, Location, Meta.
Creative Surprises
Picking cards at random creates combinations of situation, characters, locations, and other story elements that might not occur to you otherwise. Shuffle the deck, draw a few cards, study them. See what your creative synapses cook up
FOR ANY MEDIUM or GENRE
Wether you’re a novelist, filmmaker, comics creator, game designer, art directorl, stand-up comedian, or any other kind of storyteller, Narata helps you develop concepts or whole storylines. Work in any genre, from Thriller to Romance to Fantasy to Comedy.
Card Categories
Illustrated Cards
Three-Card Combinations
RAPID-FIRE IDEAS
Say you drew these three cards at random: SCIENTIST, DRAGON, THEME PARK. It’s too late now, but you might have come up with the concept for Jurassic Park, Michael Crichon’s blockbuster novel.
Of course, a gifted storyteller can come up with several different stories based on these three cards:
Young Adult Fantasy: While visiting a popular theme park, three nerdy friends discover a portal to a magical world, and a crazy old wizard tells them they are heroes prophesied to save the land from an evil dragon.
Thriller: A young art historian becomes convinced a series of brutal murders are connected to paintings by an obscure genius, but the police won’t listen to her.
Western: A medical doctor and his wife settle in what seems to be an idyllic frontier town, only to discover the town is terrorized by a ruthless, murderous land owner called Drake.
Card Layout
The carefully designed layout, style, and colors of Narata Storytelling Cards make them easily readable, with maximum associative power and creative impact. They’re fun to work with, and let you brainstorm and create more freely and therefore also more effectively. Each card “reacts” with the scene, concept, character, or story you’re working on.
At the top of each card, you see the title in white capital letters. The card colors tell you which category the card belongs to. The image illustrates the concept and title as literally as possible. Together, the title and image create strong, often surprising, concepts or images in your mind. At the bottom, the associations field further expands the associative power of the card.
Narata cards are standard baseball collectible size, 2½ inches by 3½ inches (6.4 cm by 8.9 cm).
Card Categories
The deck is divided into ten categories useful for developing story ideas and plots, scenes, themes and characters. In order to make working with the cards more efficient (and fun), each category has its own color.
After some time of regular use, associating the colors with categories become second nature. You can use the card categories methodically, for example by drawing pairs of Character cards in conjunction with, say, one Location card, one Object card, and one Goal card, or you can just deal cards totally randomly and see what surprising and brilliant story ideas manifest on your desktop.
8 Great Books for Story Creators
Even before starting work on Narata Storytelling Cards, my library of craft books on storytelling, plotting, writing novels and screenplays, and comics creation was extensive. I have read almost all of them and some of them multiple times. Picking just eight books to...
Narata Storytelling Tips
Here I've collected some notes regarding the craft of storytelling. You are undoubtedly aware of some of these ideas, but maybe one or two of them will give you a little aha! moment. These ideas are independent of whether or not you use Narata Storytelling Cards in...
27 Card Logline
The logline is the heart of your story, and summarizes, in one or maybe two sentences, the hero, his problem or goal, the main conflict, and ideally also what is at stake if the hero fails. Usually it does not suggest outcome. Using Narata and your creative powers,...
