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...

This month, we took advantage of the National Trust's free autumn tickets to visit Agatha Christie's holiday home, Greenway on the River Dart. You can stroll down through the gardens to the boathouse where her famous detective Hercule Poirot solved one of his murder mysteries in "Dead Man's Folly", which was filmed in the grounds. You can even sit in the author's favourite chair with a panoramic view of the river and watch seals basking at low tide on the rocks opposite. There is a lot more river traffic these days, but it is still a magical place. So what else would you expect to find in her garden than writing prompts to inspire today's authors? I found this nature-inspired prompt on the path to the fountain where Agatha's much-loved pets rest in their peaceful little graves. It's one of my favourite spots in the garden and immediately brings water to mind, closely linked in my memory to the grotto further down the garden where a goddess called K...

Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I took part in Flash NANO for the first time in November 2022. Novelists have NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) where the idea is to write 50,000 words over the month of November.  The flash fiction equivalent sets thirty prompts for the same period. The idea is to have thirty pieces of new flash fiction to edit, polish, and submit.  I did manage to get thirty stories written though, by the nature of these things, some prompts were easier to do than others. I normally write at least two new flash pieces a week. To write one a day was a new departure. It helps to accept you just write to the challenge. You worry about editing later.  What was interesting was finding some of my stories were coming in at the 200 word mark, others were at the higher end of flash territory (close to 1000) words. My normal “flash home” is 500 words or under so I assumed that is probably what I’d end up doing. It wasn’t alw...