Description | Synapsis

• 250 cards that prompt characters, settings, plots, and conversation. There are 30 Spark cards to provide genre and context, 140 Riff and 30 Connect cards to get you exploring language and sentences, and 50 Ask cards to focus you on character, setting, and plot. 

• Includes suggestions for playing with a group or as a solo writing prompts.

• Synesthetic– Synesthesia is when you experience one sense via another, as in smelling color or tasting music. Sometimes the sentences you write in Synapsis will have a synesthetic quality, which gives them a vivid, mysterious energy.

• Improvisational and spontaneous– In Synapsis, you jump around from story element to story element. You don't need to start at the beginning of a story.

• Only one rule: "Say Yes." Because imagination lives on Yes! Yes opens doors and Yes makes stories come to life. 

• Parents, teachers, and therapists: Synapsis can help with sentence structure, figurative language (simile and metaphor), conversational skills, sequential thinking, memory recall, as well as with fostering imagination and empathy.

• Made in USA and ships from beautiful Vermont.

• Ages 10 and up. That's not a set-in-stone rule about age range, of course.

What does Synapsis mean? Well, in biology, synapsis happens when two chromosomes join and begin the process of cellular division that leads to life. In Storymaticology, Synapsis happens when ideas fuse to create a new story.

Synapses are spaces between nerve cells that carry messages from one cell to another–they're the spaces in your brain that stories jump across, and a synopsis is a brief summary of a story.

Synapsis combines these things into a super-flexible prompt and game that starts with a couple of words, which then lead you into a sentence, which then leads you into your imagination, which then leads you into a story.

Writer Tim Weed playing Synapsis at Boston Lit Crawl with memoirist Ethan Gilsdorf and YA author Molly Booth.