Midweek writing prompt – voyage

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Judy

Imagine your character is setting off on a journey. They’re preparing their boat and packing up all the belongings they hold dear, kissing loved ones goodbye and thinking about a voyage into the unknown. They may be afraid, excited, eager to go or reluctant. They may be running to, or away from something.

But here’s the catch – you can’t write about the voyage itself, only the days or hours running up to that moment when they cast off and let the waves take hold, wind in the sails, harbour mouth ahead.

Can you create a full tale, beginning, middle and end, action and consequence, conflict and resolution, personal development, without your character actually leaving shore?

Give it a try. You may be pleasantly surprised by what such narrow constraints bring out in your writing.

If you write something prompted by this, please let me know by sending an email to Judy(at)socket creative.com. With your permission, I’d love to share it on SkyLightRain.com.

Midweek writing prompt – eye of the beholder

Posted on September 17, 2014 by Judy

Last week I showcased some of Stephen Mason’s extraordinary photography. The images in this post are also by Stephen. His interest in the differences between our own perception and that of the camera’s lens really caught my imagination.

Stephen explains that when watching a moving subject, the eyes and the brain “combine, through time, to make sense of the movement. They ‘see through’ the motion to perceive what’s actually there. The camera is much more literal. It ‘sees’ only what the film or digital sensor is exposed to in a certain; very short, period of time.”

In a longer exposure, this blurs the image, but in a shorter exposure, Stephen says, it records a single moment in time that the eye has missed. “The result can be quite surprising, even startling.”

For this week’s #writingprompt I suggest that you take your camera for a wander round your neighbourhood. Keep your eyes and mind open, and take shots of anything that catches your attention. When you get home, sort through the images and find one that nudges at you, gets you wondering. Then let the words begin to flow…

If you write something prompted by this, please let me know by sending an email to Judy(at)socket creative.com. With your permission, I’d love to share it on SkyLightRain.com.

Persistance of Time © Stephen Mason

Midweek writing prompt – future self

Posted on July 2, 2014 by Judy

The Write Life magazine, which is on the App Store for iPads and iPhones. Laura’s idea utilises Futureme.org, a great service that allows you to write an email to yourself and have it delivered to your inbox at some point in the next 50 years. I’d just like to add the suggestion of doing this for one of your characters instead of yourself, and imagining the response of their future self to receiving the email at some random time in the future.

Of course, there’s no reason not to send an imaginary missive to your past self too…

What a great chance to write about something you’re going through right now, a challenge, a blessing; a hard job or a young love, and think about what your future self would think about it. Another way of thinking about it is, what will your future self want to say to the younger you?

Warm it Up!

1. Decide what event to write about, and which “future you” you want to send the email to. Do you want to read it six months from now, a year, five years, ten? You can choose to have the email delivered anytime in the next 50 years.

Work it out

2. Head to www.futureme.org/

3. Spend 10-15 minutes writing the letter. What do you want to say about what is happening right now, and perhaps where you hope to be when you read the email?

4. Be sure to choose an email address that you’re likely still to use in the future. Also check that futureme.org is whitelisted by your email provider so that it doesn’t land in your spam folder.

Cool it Down

5. Choose whether to make the letter private or ‘public, but anonymous’. The ‘public, but anonymous’ letters that have been delivered recently are published on this page, http://www.futureme.org/letters/recently_delivered?offset=0, and make for great reading.

6. Hit send!

Got an idea for a writing prompt you’d like to share? Send it to me at Judy(at)socket creative.com!

And if you write something prompted by this, please let me know. With your permission, I’d love to publish it on SkyLightRain.com.

Midweek writing prompt – flotsam

Posted on April 2, 2014 by Judy

This week’s #writingprompt is inspired by tides and time and all the things they carry. Imagine this, you’re walking along a beach when you spot something ahead of you on the sand. At first you dismiss it as a piece of rubbish swept in on the current, but as you draw closer you hear a strange sound – there’s something or someone trapped inside…

The rest is up to you.

If you write something prompted by this idea, I’d love to know. Just send an email to Judy(at)socket creative.com. With your permission, I may publish it on SkyLightRain.com.

Midweek writing prompt – needful things

Posted on March 26, 2014 by Judy

I received a press release this week about classical dance company MurleyDance exploring “the emotional attachments we form with objects, from technology to trinkets and treasures.”

On the same day I edited a magazine feature about gardeners and the tools they are most fond of, from the ancient trowel inherited from a grandparent to the knife brought back from Istanbul.

It’s something that’s always fascinated me – the way a seemingly worthless piece of costume jewellery or holiday souvenir can come to mean so much. I believe the reason for this value is the stories such items contain – the memories they resonate with (either that or as in Tolkein’s vision, they have a real, deadly power).

So this week, I urge you to pause a moment and consider the items you hold dear. Select the most unlikely of these, an old chipped mug, for example, a tiny pair of cast iron love birds, or a key that fits no lock you know, and make one or two the focus of a short story. Horror elements optional.

If you write something prompted by this idea, I’d love to know. Just send an email to Judy(at)socket creative.com. With your permission, I may publish it on SkyLightRain.com.

Midweek writing prompt – perception

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Judy

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the puzzles of perception – about how much of what we see and think we comprehend is influenced by our own state of mind. Not all other worldly apparitions are truly ghosts, after all.

I took this photograph at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh and still don’t understand quite how this image was formed, but I find it rather beautiful, and particularly apt for the setting.

Make the explanation for this the basis of your story.

If you write something prompted by this image and idea, I’d love to know. Just send an email to Judy(at)socket creative.com. You could end up published on SkyLightRain.com!

Midweek writing prompt – the gift

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Judy

I encountered this little fella tucked between some stones in a wall at a stately home in Cornwall. It made me laugh, and point it out to the people I was with, then leave it in its cubbyhole for other visitors to discover.

And it made me wonder who had made it there, then left it for someone to find. Had they tucked it in there with a particular recipient in mind?

It reminded me of To Kill A Mockingbird, and how Scout and her brother Jem find gifts hidden in the knothole of a tree, and how the discovery of the source of those presents changes everything.

What might your character find or hide in an unlikely place, and why? What could the consequences be?

As always, if you write something prompted by this image, I’d love to know. Just send an email to Judy(at)socket creative.com. You could end up published on SkyLightRain.com!

Mid-week writing prompt – imperil your characters

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Judy

This is a good trick that sometimes has breathtaking results. Take your characters and place them somewhere perilous – abseiling down a cliff face, on a small boat in a stormy sea, far underground – and then get them to have that conversation they’ve been putting off for far too long.

Their emotions will be heightened by the circumstance you’ve stuck them in, which will add drama to every niggling complaint, accusation, declaration of love, or whatever fearful thing you want them to own up to.

If this image prompts you to write something, I’d love to know. Just send an email to Judy(at)socket creative.com. You could end up published on the site!

Mid-week writing prompt – a willingness to believe

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Judy

The other day while out for a run I noticed two women with pushchairs blocking the path ahead. Seeing me, they moved the buggies out of my way (thanks!) so I sped past, then slowed on seeing two toddlers ambling ahead.

Just as they turned towards me, a feather dropped from the sky and landed from the path between us, and the toddlers gazed up at me with astonishment, as though they thought that somehow I had made that happen. A magic trick under the shadowy canopy of the trees.

All fiction writing is a form of magic trick, asking of our readers that they suspend their scepticism just long enough to slip into our carefully crafted reality. The best writing does this so skilfully we don’t realise it’s happening until we emerge from the tale.

Small children, by nature, have a head start on the rest of us. Try taking one of your old stories with a grown up POV and re-write it from the point of view of a very small child. You might be surprised by what emerges!