Tag: fiction prompts

Unlock your writing with prompts from Margate and Cambridge: May, 2025

Leave a comment

These prompts are offered individually or taken together as a whole, whatever comes to you. Or you may find just two of three words take you off into your own writing world. With prompts, you can’t get anything wrong, as long as you write and keep writing as far as the energy takes you. The paradox, as always, is that the less you aim for excellence, the more easily the good stuff will be free to find you. Have a happy time:

The lad came to the door at night,

when lovers crown their vows,

and whistled soft and out of sight

in shadow of the boughs. 

A Shropshire Lad, LIII, The True Lover, AE Housman, 1896

For I will consider my lover, who shall remain nameless.

For at the age of 49 he can make the noise of five different kinds of lorry changing gear on a hill.

My Lover, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, Wendy Cope, 1986

“A mighty pain to love it is,
And ‘t is a pain that pain to miss;
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.”

Abraham Cowley, The Poems of Abraham Cowley, 1618 – 1667

‘Father! Father! Where are you going? / O do not walk so fast.’

 Little Boy Lost, Songs of Innocence & Experience, William Blake, 1794

But it was from one little window, with its blind drawn down, a mere blank transparency on the night, that the sense of home and the little curtained world within the walls – the larger stressful world of outside Nature shut out and forgotten – most pulsated.

The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame, 1908

it’s not that i miss tamarind balls mashed up in my palm

squashed by my thumb   licking it clot by sticky clot

on its way to my mouth

Tamarind, I Sing to the Greenhearts, Maggie Harris, 2025

Writing prompts for today

Leave a comment

These are for my Cambridge writers who are joining me later today. They’re for you too – if you find something helpful here. Happy writing:

I can still smell the smoke from the house burning in my brain

Dorianne Laux: Finger exercises for poets

The dog looked as if it was about to cry, too

Orhan Pamuk: The Museum of Innocence (trans Maureen Freely)

The nightmares. Some kept coming back like that one about the flowers. Enormous blossoms of all colors, opening and closing their petal-portals, come in, come in!

Lygia Fagundes Telles: The Girl in the Photograph (trans Margaret A Neves)

You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will all be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there; so it is with greatness in men.

Chinua Achebe: No Longer at Ease

I have frequently observed this curious aspect of power: that it is often when one is physically closest to its source that one is least well informed as to what is actually going on.

Robert Harris: Imperium (told by Tiro, Cicero’s confidential secretary for 36 years)

Could food be the heart and soul of your story? Prompts from my group last weekend

Leave a comment

Food is essential to a healthy balanced life, we’re told. I’d say it can be a vital part of balanced writing too and I don’t just mean those favourite biscuits you keep handy while you type.

Can you think of scenes in something you’ve read or seen that stick with you more because of the food in them? I don’t just mean the Royale with cheese in Pulp Fiction (one of the film’s most memorable scenes though it plays no part in moving the story forward). For me, favourites run from The Wind in the Willows (Ratty’s wicker ‘luncheon basket’ opens up to all sorts of beautiful meals in that lovely book) to A Christmas Carol where Scrooge needs a lesson in how food and generosity can bring us all together, and Chocolat where the stranger in town opens a chocolate shop and upsets the community balance in all sorts of delicious ways. This treat (wonderfully named ‘The Passionate Epicure’, written exactly 100 years ago) came up in our writing group chat on Saturday – thank you, Kate!

Food in a story reveals depths in our characters as well as anchoring us with them in their reality.

Here are some prompts I’ve lifted at random from recipe books:

Cordon Bleu Cookery, 1976 (given to me by my mother): ‘Hot souffles are often considered to be the test of a good cook. They are not difficult to make if you follow the basic rules.’ Those lines always makes me laugh as I’ve never baked a good one and can’t be bothered now to try.

Pasta by Carla Bardi, 2010: ‘Warm the yoghurt in a small saucepan over low heat. Add the garlic, chopped kiwi fruit, and lemon zest. Season with salt and pepper.’ Proving you really can put anything with pasta.

Michel Roux, The French Revolution, 2018: ‘Roll out the pastry to a circle about 3cms wider than the pan. Place this on top of the figs, tucking the excess pastry around them.’ Yum.

The prompts below come from Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, 1989:

The news seemed to move the Captain. In a barely audible voice, he replied, ‘That is a pity, a very great pity.’

The steam rising from the pan mingled with the heat given off by Tita’s body. The anger she felt within her acted like yeast on bread dough.

‘Look, it would be better if we didn’t dig up the past; I don’t care what Pedro’s motives were in marrying me. the fact is he did.’

More thoughts are below for a foodie brainstorm with your main characters. Food can arrive by bike via an app, in a packet or from a hob delivered by a kind neighbour in a crisis, whatever comes to mind. Ask your character to tell you in the usual character chat way, explained here –

About their favourite meals: what do they like to eat/ when/ where/ with whom/ in any particular contexts?

Who makes or provides this favourite food? Why? You, the character, or another character in the story? Why or why not?

Ask about food shopping: what/ where/ how/ when etc. Do they enjoy it? Loathe it? Why?

And so on. This kind of discovery can go on as long as you like. It limbers up your writing muscle, invites your characters back into your imagination after a break, and might even lead to you writing something that can go straight into your book. Even if it doesn’t quite do that last one, it might next time. Happy writing!

Writing prompts for poetry, fiction or short story

Leave a comment

In Margate, my writing group reckoned that our senses are their favourite writing prompts and that visual prompts are particularly wonderful. The spirit of JMW Turner haunts the air and skies around here and the Turner Contemporary Gallery is just around the corner, so we’re not short of visual stimulus. In case you’re looking for images today, here are some photographs – happy writing.

In Cambridge yesterday though, the writers called for written prompts as well. These below are culled from the wonderful poetry anthology, The Rattle Bag edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes:

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood

Throws down in front of us is not to bar

Our passage to our journey’s end for good

But just to ask us who we think we are.

‘On a Tree Fallen Across the Road’, 1921, by Robert Frost

Before the sixth day of the next new year,

Strange wonders in this kingdom shall appear.

From ‘On the Cards and Dice’ by Sir Walter Raleigh, c 1553-1618

My mother said to me not to be talking with you today,

or tomorrow, or on the Sunday;

it was a bad time she took for telling me that;

it was shutting the door after the house was robbed.

Translation from Irish anon by Lady Augusta Gregory, 1852-1932

One of the pumps has been shot away – it is generally thought we are sinking

From ‘Song of Myself’ by Walt Whitman, 1819-1892

It was the evening all afternoon

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar limbs.

From ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ (any one of them could serve as a prompt) by Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955

The Angel that presided o’er my birth

Said, ‘Little creature, form’d of Joy and Mirth,

Go love without the help of any Thing on Earth.’

From ‘The Angel that presided o’er my birth’ by William Blake, 1757-1827

Whatever works for you is your best prompt. Happy writing!

Writing Prompts

1 Comment

Last Sunday at Marine Studios in Margate, my Where to Start Writing group were chatting about what sort of prompts work best. Many writers don’t need prompts of course. Their words churn in the brain like planes stacking above an airport and all they need is a quiet place and time. But sometimes we sit down to write and can’t get going.

If you have the confidence to start just anywhere, you won’t go far wrong. Fill a few pages with free scribbling, and keep writing – eyes down, let anything come – even when you think the words have dried. In time and with luck, your priorities about what you’re writing and then your story will find their way through to you.

Another way is use prompts. What did the Margate writers like best? Visual imagery was high on the list and I’ve added to my page of photo prompts here for you to have fun with. (I used to be able to add new photos to the top of the page but some update or other means we have to scroll down now, I’m afraid.)

Sensual prompts work too. As Marcel Proust knew, our sense of smell is marvellous for leading us by the nose down memory lane. Taste, touch, sounds especially music, they all work too. For me, anything from a kitchen drawer or in the bathroom cupboard can be useful. Hold whatever it is, really feel its textures and smells, its possibilities, its past, take a moment, then start writing…

A single word can be a good jump start sometimes. Specific words – blanket, door, pebble, rings, pages, trumpet – or abstracts like peace, exile, home, need, money, hope.

Character writing is excellent of course and my blogposts about getting deep inside your characters are useful there. A way back into writing a novel after a time of distraction is to choose an emotion (rage, love, grief etc.) and write a monologue for each of your main characters where they talk to you (and you write on your page or screen) how they feel about that emotion and how they are when they are deep in it. That should have them wading back into your imagination, ready for action.

Happy writing, however you do it. Here is a taster of my photo prompts for today:

Prompts from Churchill Writers last Saturday

Leave a comment

Still, at least somebody had noticed. This whole time, I was calm. I was the picture of calm.

Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk

And they looked from one to another in sudden understanding.

The Hound of Ulster, Rosemary Sutcliff

‘He’s a lawyer in Atlanta, and he’s very active in his church,’ Mrs Bennet said. ‘If that’s not the description of a man looking for a wife, I don’t know what is.’

Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld

Without stopping, without even turning his head, he passed the little blue house. But he looked at it out of the corner of his eye.

The Age of Reason, Sartre (tr. Eric Sutton)

He sat at the table, stood up, sat down again, stared gloomily at the wall for some minutes, lit his pipe, and then, laboriously, with a single first finger and his heart heavy with misgiving, he typed the first news story of his meteoric career.

Scoop, Evelyn Waugh

No more of my writing groups are scheduled now until September, to allow everyone to enjoy the so far chilly and rather wet UK summer. Wherever you are, happy writing.