Using the "Writer Emergency Pack" to Conquer Writer's Block

I should start off by saying I've got zero connection to anyone who made this deck of cards; I don't know any of them on a personal, business, or other kind of level. I'm not a sales guy, just a writer utilizing some new methods to help kill my writer's block whenever possible. This is one way that's recently worked.

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I remember seeing the Kickstarter funding page for these floating around Facebook a few years ago. I also remembered thinking they were a mad cool idea. The funding had already been met and all the packs they'd made were already sold out or given away to people that donated. No biggie...I signed up for notifications on when they'd print more.

Fast forward a couple years and I see them on Amazon and looked back at their site (https://writeremergency.com/) and sure enough, there are packs for sale. I ordered a single deck. Once they arrived, they sat on my bookshelf, unused, for about a year and a half until last night.

I've been working on my third story collection since December. One story, of which I really like, seems to be having three totally different and unrelated narratives going on and I'm unsure of how to continue with the story as I like all the moving parts being together in one bit of fiction.

So I broke out the Writer Emergency Pack to see if it could help jumpstart an idea for moving forward with the narrative and decided to start following someone else's directions.

Seems simple enough, so I shuffle all 26 illustrated idea cards, both in my hands and then again all over the table (like dominos).

After choosing the card "Switch Genres" randomly, I now need to choose from the other 26 cards in the deck. These correspond in number to the Switch Genres card.

Both sides have differing ways of interpreting the idea of switching genres in order to propel the narrative forward. These are good ideas, but the issue with my story isn't the genre. I tend to write pretty surrealist stuff, but I've also written plenty of traditional fiction. The problem is that there feels like there's something missing that could tie the story all together more perfectly. A third aspect that's simply just not on the page yet.

So I shuffle the cards again and draw six more possibilities to see where it gets me.

These options immediately feel more likely to spark some new ideas, thankfully. And honestly, as soon as I saw the "Narrator" cards, my mind immediately went to the movie "Stranger than Fiction" with Will Ferrell and I could totally tell that a narrator would be both a great comedic foil to the tragedy happening within the larger narrative and a perfect way of bringing two seemingly disparate issues together.

So I obviously need to start working on that piece today with this new bit of editorial information, but you can see how just a quick ten minutes playing with a few ideas in the deck can spark what might be the perfect solution to a problem (or three; or five) in your writing that you can't seem to solve.

The deck also comes with a card of brief instructions to help writers out in other ways with the deck as well, turning it into a game rather than just a purely reference kind of activity.