via http://couros.wikispaces.com/Digitalstorytelling

Try a Story Idea Prompt
So if you are stuck for ideas, here are some prompts:

    * What was your favorite childhood pet?
    * Where was your most memorable vacation?
    * What topic most inspired you in grade school?
    * Where is a place in the world you'd like to visit?
    * What is the most adventurous thing you have done?
    * Who was an influential authority in your subject discipline?
    * Or just describe a collection of things such as
          o Five attributes of a great writer
          o The top technology gadgets of the future
          o Most important discoveries in your field
          o Favorite cars, vegetables, flowers, tools
          o Collection of things that don't belong

Why is it I have such a hard time writing down stories?

via http://www.openculture.com/2009/05/getting_hired_and_fired_by_the_new_yorker_as_told_in_tweets.html

"Kathy Sierra is the author of Creating Passionate Users, and has been interested in the brain and artificial intelligence since her days as a game developer (Virgin, Amblin', MGM). She is the co-creator of the bestselling brain-friendly Head First series (winner of the Jolt Software Development award in 2004). She is also the founder of one of the largest programmer community web sites, javaranch.com. Much of the theory and practice behind "passionate users" began when she developed and taught the first Interaction Design and New Media courses at UCLA Extension's Entertainment Studies Department, and at the IBM New Media Center at Universal Studios Citywalk. A former master trainer for Sun Microsystems, she has spent the last few years helping others learn to apply brain-friendly techniques to inspire and maintain passionate users. Resources Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, by Salen and Zimmerman"

"a not-for-profit storytelling organization, was founded in New York in 1997 by poet and novelist George Dawes Green, who wanted to recreate in New York the feeling of sultry summer evenings on his native St. Simon's Island, Georgia, where he and a small circle of friends would gather to spin spellbinding tales on his friend Wanda's porch. After moving to New York, George missed the sense of connection he had felt sharing stories with his friends back home, and he decided to invite a few friends over to his New York apartment to tell and hear stories. Thus the first "Moth" evening took place in his living room. Word of these captivating story nights quickly spread, and The Moth moved to bigger venues in New York. Today, The Moth conducts six ongoing programs and has brought more than 2,000 live stories to over 60,000 audience members. Why "The Moth"? The screen around Wanda's porch had a hole where moths would flutter in and get trapped in the light. Similarly, George and his friends found that the characters in their best stories would often find themselves drawn to some bright light—of adventure, ambition, knowledge—but then find themselves burned or trapped, leaving them with some essential conflict to face before the story could reach its conclusion. So George and his original group of storytellers called themselves "The Moths". George took the name with him to New York, where he hoped that New Yorkers, too, would find themselves drawn to storytelling as moths to a flame. They did. With no advertising, through sheer word of mouth, every show to date has sold out in 48 hours or less."

"THIS IS THE highest-resolution video you can get, better than reality,” says Mr. Cardoza. He gropes across the dark table top for the joystick and zooms in on the face of a white woman sitting in the lobby, sipping tea and reading a magazine. Jipi tacitly deconstructs the white woman’s makeup system, which is recently applied (it’s about 9 a.m.) and about as well done as anything she’s ever seen on an actual person, as opposed to an actress. So that’s the kind of person who stays at the Manila Hotel. One reason watching films is fun is that you can gape at beautiful people without being, or even feeling like, a creep. But film actors always look perfect. Even when a nearby detonation blows a ton of muck all over them, you know the dirt will end up in neat, bone-structure-enhancing diagonal streaks under the cheekbones. In a certain sense this gets boring after a while. You never get to stare at real people, with all of their mistakes and imperfections, in the same way you can stare at film stars. Unless, that is, you’ve got a rig like Mr. Cardoza’s concealed in a nearby flower arrangement. He’s absolutely right about the resolution. Jipi zooms in on the woman’s left eye and finds that her eyeliner, which from arm’s length would look flawless, is in fact as jiggly as a seismograph tracing: a permanent record of every cappuccino-induced tremor that passed through her hand when she was applying it, and of every rumble that shook the hotel’s foundations from the heavy equipment of the All-Manila Sanitary Sewer System Overhaul Project (Amsssop), which is advancing on the Hotel as noisily and inexorably as great big mechanized armies did way back when. Jipi can see the tweedy striations in the woman’s iris as it reciprocates across the page of her magazine. But then, either there is a minor temblor or else one of those Amsssop caterpillars across the street strikes bedrock, and the vibration turns the image into an elliptical blur that almost makes Jipi a little queasy. Mr. Cardoza gropes for the joystick and zooms way back. “That’s too close anyway,” he says. Then he reconsiders. “At least, it is for me. Some of our Guest Comfort Facilitators concentrate entirely on the nostrils.”"