Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I love using a wide variety of writing prompts. They’re great for triggering further ideas. Sometimes they’re enough for me to picture a potential character. Sometimes the prompt gives me a theme. Sometimes, especially with opening line prompts, I have a way into a story and I then create the best character to meet the needs of that prompt. I’m unlikely to have a character with their head in a book taking part in an action story, for example. (It’s not impossible but it’s unlikely I’d do it).  Writing to prompts regularly has helped me get used to writing to prompts set by anyone else. This is useful for competitions with set themes. It’s also handy for responding to writing exercises set by workshop leaders at events such as The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick. I set prompts for the monthly Zoom meeting of the Association of Christian Writers Flash Fiction Group . I join in with the prompts on the night and, ...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I love writing prompts. I use a wide variety ranging from the various random generators to story cubes to picking a proverb or phrase from books and then writing a tale around this saying. They are excellent as themes. I also use books of prompts and have contributed to some too. As I write a lot of flash fiction and short stories, I always need ways of coming up with ideas. I focus on getting the characters outlined because for me characters make or break a story. But I’ve found the prompts have been brilliant in giving me my themes (and these often trigger the ideas for the characters to service said themes well). I enter competitions regularly too. Some have open themes but the majority I go in for have a set theme. I’ve found writing to prompts is useful practice for writing to competition themes set by someone else.  I also like mixing up the prompts I use as this (a) keeps me on my creative toes and (b) me...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Do you always write to a theme or do you see where your characters take you (and see what the theme is from that)? I’ve done both but these days I prefer knowing what my theme is in advance (even when I set it).  What characters could serve/demonstrate this theme well? I don’t plan out everything. I want to give my imagination what I call manoeuvre room but I need something to get me started. This is where having a set theme is handy. For my short stories and flash fiction, I often write to a theme set by someone else for competitions, themes set by a magazine editor, and so on. I like the challenge here. Having a theme to write to also gives me a framework and I find that structure helpful. I try to keep a stock of stories (standard length short and flash) so when I have an open theme competition, I know I’ve got something I can look at, polish, and submit. The trouble with openness is there are times it can be...

Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos.  Writing exercises make me think outside of my usual creative box and help me mix up how I create a story.  Using Random Generators I use random generators a lot. These include generators for random words, pictures, objects, verbs, themes, questions - the list is almost endless. All make me respond to the challenge of getting a story from what was generated. Often I can generate something and get two different stories. I like that a lot. Double bubble and all that. I send one of those stories off to an online magazine I write for and the other I use for my YouTube channel so I get to tick the submit a fresh story and do some marketing boxes all at the same time here. I like that a lot too.  First Drafts and Warming Up When I run workshops, I set exercises. For a recent one at the Swanwick Writers’ Summer School, I prepared my material but deliberately didn’t draft my “answers” to the exercises I set. I wr...

  Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. How easy do you find coming up with ideas? I’m always on the lookout for new ones. I write flash fiction and blog for online magazines, so I always need a stock of ideas.    As well as writing on topics of interest to me (and I hope other writers), I use random generators to trigger ideas. These work especially well for fiction but I have used things like a random question generator to give me a blog theme.   I also use prompt books and have contributed to a couple. I like the challenge of rising to a theme set by someone else and bringing my take to it. With the random generators, I can do this via variety of means.  I have used the following:- Random word/object generators. Random noun/adjective/verb generators. Random name generators (a recent story of mine was accepted for an online magazine and the idea for it came from the generated name). Random question generators. (Great for use as...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One of the ways I fire up my imagination is to use random generators.   I’ve used the following to good effect. Random Noun/Adjective/Verb generators. Random Question generators (good for giving ideas for themes, sometimes titles). Random Number generators (I’ve used a number as a countdown in a story. I’ve also used it as part of an address where the action happened). Random Name generators (where you can generate a first name, surname, or both). Random Picture generator. If I select a landscape I come up with who might live there and what happens to them in this landscape. If I select a picture of a person, I prefer those where they are doing something, such as walking away from the camera at the time the shot was taken. I can rough out a story around that. Who is this person? What or whom are they walking away from? Could they be walking towards something instead? A successful generator makes me ask que...