Martin Luther King Jr in a Hat
A wacky story-writing game
Last week, I came up with a riff on the old idea of pulling in a few random things to spur writing. I’d been thinking about MLK Day, because, well, it was MLK Day when I was curriculum prepping. My Core Class was already working on our Letters for Change project, which can get a bit heavy, as kids write letters to tackle the big problems they see in the world. So I wanted something playful, and something that would move into a bigger unit on stories. I began to think about a game centered on characters facing things that are unfair.
Well, this is what I came up with: MLK in a Hat. But not only MLK! Also Taylor Swift, and Super Mario and who knows who else. And they would all be fighting injustices, large and small, helped and hindered by outfielders, puppies, and other peoples’ fear of spiders. For example.
How to play:
Get five hats or bowls or cauldrons or whatever.
Get five slips of paper per person.
On the first piece of paper, which goes in the first hat, write the name of a character. Should be someone, fictional or real, that everyone knows.
On the second piece of paper, which goes in the second hat, write something that is unfair. It can be as big as segregation or as little as a sister who ate your cookie.
Third piece is an object.
Fourth, an ally. Can be a human, or any other helpful being.
In the fifth hat, put an obstacle. It can be outer (giant wall of ice) or inner (greed).
Those catagories again are:
Character
Unfair thing
Object
Ally
Obstacle
Everyone draws one slip of paper from every hat. Then they write a story where the character has to face the unfair thing. The object comes in somehow, they have the ally to help them and the obstacle to make things more complicated.
Afterwards, we read our stories, which were hilarious and often dreamlike. Mario has no ice cream, but Governor Bob Ferguson can help, until it’s time for baseball practice! Taylor Swift campaigns to help girls have access to school – until she falls off a tightrope into a pit of acid! There was a sense of action and sometimes calamity. Lots of weirdness, but nothing boring.
I played this with my Young Writer’s Workshop, my middle school Creative Writing class, and my Core Classes, to universal enjoyment and wackiness. It didn’t stay too close to its MLK Day origins, but I used it as an intro into more storywriting work, which we will dig deeper into over the coming weeks. It was the kind of game where as soon as we were done someone would want to play it again.