To celebrate National Dark Poetry Day in October, Amy Zoellers and I will be playing a poetry role playing game (RPG) with the game’s creator Sean McAnnally of Nerd Glows On [https://nerdglowson.com]. In this show we practice our dice rolling as a way to generate creative prompts.
Here’s how it works:
I created three numbered lists of verbs, nouns and adverbs. I added 10 words to each list to use with a 10 sided dice. The rest is simple. Roll your dice once for each list and write the corresponding word down.
For this session, the words listed were:
Amy and I took turns rolling the dice and creating lines. I originally thought we would just make prompts to work from, but the raw poems created like this were pretty good as is. We created two seed poems during the show, but I’ll just work with one here.
We rolled seven lines and came up with this raw poem:
I like this poem as is, but the original idea was to use this method to generate prompts for new poems so I continued to work on this after the show with the following result:
I could keep developing this poem at this point, but I’m pretty happy with the result as a way to kickstart my creative juices. This rolling dice method prompted me to create something I wouldn’t normally write, which is always a win in my mind. I’m going to put this down as something I will probably do again. Let me know if you try it.
If you don’t have rpg dice laying around, there are plenty of free virtual dice available online. Just Google “online rpg dice” or use this D10 from rolz.org [https://rolz.org/tools/mini?q=1d10] You can also get pretty fancy, like these black obsidian gemstone dice. In the video, mine are just plastic.
Follow this link to watch us “roll poetry” during tomorrow’s Exorcise Your Writes show on YouTube or watch below.