This year for my birthday, I wanted something different. When Jan spotted Rory’s Story Cubes on Amazon, I was immediately sold.

You think I’m mad, don’t you? What would a 31-year-old mom want with story cubes? Well, inspiration. I find, as a writer, that the writing prompts online are few and far between, and the ones that are available are so, so tired.

So, I got story cubes for my birthday.

The idea is that I’ll roll these babies weekly and post a photo of how they fell here. The challenge is that I’ll write a story of about 500 words to go with it. Hopefully, this will inspire me a little, and maybe it’ll inspire you too.

I’m going to do it this way :

I’ll roll three random story cubes first, to inspire the hero of our story.

Then I’ll roll all of the cubes to inspire the actual story. There are nine cubes. On the Story Cubes website, they use the guideline that three cubes are for the start of the story, three for the middle and three for the end.

As far as rules go, every cube has to be included in the story in some way or another. This is obviously open to interpretation. I mean, you see the arrow pointing left (or west) and indicating the hero’s direction, I see an arrow flying from a bow.

The cubes can be used in any order. I’ll just line them up for a photo in random order. I certainly won’t make a story out of them in the order they are pictured, so you don’t have to, except if you want to.

I’ll try to stick around 500 words, but this isn’t an official rule and it may or may not include the hero’s description. 😀 It’s more a guideline that can be bent depending on the amount of inspiration that finds me.

If you join me in this challenge, you can write in whatever language you want to, but I’ll be working in English.

As far as possible, I’ll try to do these posts on Fridays – both the story from the previous week and the cubes for the next week will be uploaded in the same post. That way, all of us have some time to develop our story ideas. You’re welcome to post your story in the comments here, on my social media, on your own blog or wherever. You can tag me if you want to! I’ll be using the hashtag #storycubechallenge and you’re welcome to use that too.

Let’s get to it!

First : build your hero with the three following cubes.

Now, in any order, let these inspire your story :

OK. Now I have to go figure out something to write about these babies. I really hope you find inspiration from this and join me in this challenge. Otherwise, check back with me next week for the results!

Have a good weekend!

Yolandie