More than Writers

During lockdown I joined in a poetry challenge almost every week. Some of the challenges were easier than others. The one I am writing about here involved writing five eight-line verses using particular words. Lockdown had been eased by this time. The prompts for each verse were published a week apart, so it was impossible to predict how the poem would develop. By the time I read the prompts for weeks three, four and five, I had upset someone and was upset myself. The early verses fitted with the emotions I was experiencing and the poem seems (at least to me) to be seamless in spite of the way in which it was written. I have listed the words I included from the prompt for each octave below the poem. Ups and downs of life Sometimes life feels like Sisyphus’ boulder. No-one rolls out the red carpet for us; Sometimes they give us the cold shoulder And don’t even drink coffee with us. We needn’t keep feeling hard done by. Although some tasks are repetitive, Thinking of others...

  I've been thinking about writing prompts recently, which got me wondering as to what the benefits of using these are to the writer. I am sure many of you reading this will have used a writing prompt at some point in your life, the reason being to generate ideas? Yes, generating ideas is a large part of why we use writing prompts but there are numerous others.  1. Deepening your creativity. Yes really. Many people feel they stifle creativity by forcing you into a specific type of writing. The opposite is true. If a prompt is given to a group of people they will all interpret it differently. A crime writer is likely to turn it into a crime story or book and a fantasy writer to fantasy. However, what might happen if you decided to push the creative boat out and try a different genre, or non-fiction? Where might that take you? Whilst that might never be used for anything in print, it does allow your brain to think in different ways. Even if you do still write in your own genre i...

  Do you like writing from a prompt? When I had been blogging about a year I began using the daily prompts issued by WordPress. I was blogging as a way of improving my writing. Sometimes I posted every day! One advantage of using an online prompt or a challenge (and linking to it) is that other bloggers using the same prompt may visit your blog to see how you have responded to the challenge. These bloggers may be of any faith or none. My response to a prompt from the beginning of 2014 seems appropriate for More than Writers. My original post gave the prompt at the end in the hope that the preview of my response might intrigue potential readers. This time I’ll begin with it. For the Daily Prompt You have been transformed into a mystical being who has the ability to do magic. Describe your new abilities in detail. How will you use your new skills? Photographers, artists, poets: show us ENCHANTMENT.   I am intrigued by magic.  However, there is only one par...

A challenge for you, writers. Take the idea of 'a line' and riff on it, collecting images and impressions that belong or appear along that line. Here are some options. I'm sure you can think of others.  A railway line.  A line of script The front line A telephone line  A bee line A picket line A blood line A red line A production line A double yellow line A line in the sand A firing line The line of duty A chorus line  Form your ideas together and see what happens. Perhaps it will prompt you to write a longer piece. I wrote about a washing line . In the end, I think I was telling a story about a family, but I didn't realise it at the time.  Washing line   White sheets, flirting with the whip of an autumn breeze.  A yellow dress, its skirts wide,  reaches up then settles,  as though recalling the dance. Three black socks, and we all know why. A child's apron, wrong without flour accidents and chocolate smears.  Small tartan pyjamas, misch...

  I know my blogs can be somewhat off the wall but you’re probably thinking, she's jumped right off the cliff with this one. After all, despite this being a writing blog, paper clips don't usually feature heavily. Maybe they are just there to tidy up those blank pages. If that were only the case, as my blog would now be written and I could retire for a well earned, restorative coffee. All this writing can take it out of a girl. But no, there is more to it than that.  What I actually want to talk about is the evil monster that is the blank page. One sent to plague writers from the beginning of time. For blank page read empty cave wall.  Which of us has not sat staring at a blank page, a billion thoughts whirring around inside our head and not been able to think of a single thing to write. I may be a prolific writer but, trust me, I've been there. More times than I can ever remember. Often, I will crack out my phone, open a writing prompt app and use something I find on the...

Do you use writing prompts? I’ve used random letter, word, phrase, and even number generators to trigger ideas. For the random word and phrase ones, I use what emerges as a title or theme. Coming up with characters is fantastic fun but I like to mix up my approach to doing that. Pixabay image. Sometimes they can be a starting point. If a phrase comes up which is a cliche, my instinct as a flash fiction writer is to use it as a shortcut (cliches carry a lot of meaning in few words) but ideally subvert it. One of my stories is called Punish The Innocent . You would usually think in terms of Punish The Guilty, but you can have fun adapting phrases to your own purposes. Always a good question but mixing up how you write your stories can be fun. Pixabay image. How on earth can you use random number generators in fiction, I hear you cry? My approach is to take the number generated - e.g.  314 - and use it either as:- 1.  A countdown to something spectacular. In t...

Everywhere I turn there seem to be writing prompts popping up – for example, the wonderful Adrianne Fitzpatrick has been posting them regularly into our Facebook group, Five Minute Friday provide them and the Flourish Writers’ Conference covered the importance of them too. This all got me thinking: as a non-fiction writer and regular journaller, what prompts me to write? Here are my thoughts: I hope that something prompts you to write today ;) A Bible verse or devotional note  – sometimes a new thought on an old truth has me reaching for my pen/keyboard. A life-changing event  – it is often a big event that can trigger ideas for writing for me. Perhaps life has altered forever due to a new relationship, career change or a fresh revelation from God. Or perhaps a difficult, sad event has caused pain – this links into the below point, but I currently have a file open on my computer in which I pour out all my responses to the death of a dear young mum in our chu...

C.S. Lewis once wrote something which I haven’t yet been able to track down, despite thumbing through many of his books on my shelves and consulting Google. I’m pretty sure it’s in one of his letters. It was to the effect that if you can’t explain something in terms a child can understand, you haven’t really understood it yourself. I didn’t have that quotation in mind when I started my current enterprise, but it came back to me as I proceeded with the project. I recently offered to do a few lessons on story-writing with a friend's two little girls aged, I think, about 8 and 10, who are being home schooled. I just thought their mum might appreciate them having a few lessons which she didn’t have to prepare. I tried to keep it simple, bearing in mind their ages. So far we have done lesson 1, looking at the basic construction of a story.  They jotted down some notes, thinking about who their story concerns, and the contents of the plot. I left them an aide-memoire w...