As usual, these prompts are not a task or exercise, just something – a few lines or as a whole – to blend into your thinking, so that when you’re ready to write for ten or fifteen minutes, something will come. Trust that, however long it is since you last had a chance to write, your words are waiting to fall onto your page or screen:
The sun is puce the sky is green
The streets awash with brilliantine
This is my redcurrant dream
(Recurrent? No just the once)
I’m psychedelicate
From John Cooper Clarke’s The Luckiest Guy Alive, 2018
I know a little cupboard,
With a teeny tiny key,
And there’s a jar of Lollipops
For me, me, me.
From The Cupboard by Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)
This poem is dangerous: it should not be left
Within the reach of children, or even of adults
Who might swallow it whole, with possibly
Undesirable side-effects.
This Poem… by Elma Mitchell
‘This was Mr Strugnell’s room,’ she’ll say,
And look down at the lumpy, single bed.
‘He stayed here up until he went away
And kept his bicycle out in that shed.’
Mr Strugnell by Wendy Cope
The atheist archbishop weeps
Life is just a trap
Gazing into the inky deeps
Of a Chateauneuf-du-Pape
The Ranks of the Heathen Saints from John Cooper Clarke’s The Luckiest Guy Alive, 2018
Who will bring me the secrets of night?
‘I,’ called the Bat. ‘By the moon’s silver light.’
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)
‘Looking back, in many ways the days of the front line were my halcyon days.’
Time Come, Linton Kewsi Johnson about Railton Road in its ‘front line’ times
‘We set off the week before Christmas. It was freezing in London and our luggage sagged under the weight of our expectations and sketchbooks.’
Zandra Rhodes in Iconic
‘Dear Lonely Hearts, / my name is Nate / my hobbies are weightlifting / and tempting fate.’
Roger McGough in The Collected Poems: 1959-2024
‘Behold my bold provider, he can hunt and he can trap, / He can make a set of hinges from a piece of leather strap’
Pam Ayres, Doggedly Onward: A Life in Poems
When I come out of the bathroom, I hear Mum and Mervyn talking downstairs. At the mention of my name, I pause in the hallway to listen, my hair dripping, a towel wrapped around my waist like an untidy skirt
Whether your New Year’s Resolutions were about writing, or whether (like me) you don’t reckon with them at all, this can be an excellent time for flexing your fictional muscles again after the festivities.
When I was little, my dad used to read to me at bedtime and a big favourite was The Wind in the Willows. Through furry creatures who live by and near a river, the book has huge things to say about our inner spirit and what everybody needs to thrive. One of the most important of course is food, so these characters have gorgeous picnics and ad hoc meals where the main ingredient is their wonderful friendship. Ratty (a water vole) is passionate about boating too. Feel free to use any of the following quotes as a prompt for five or ten minutes of writing, or as long as the spirit takes you:
‘And you really live by the river? [said Mole} What a jolly life!’ ‘By it and with it and on it and in it,’ said the Rat. ‘It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world…’ The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
‘They had now entered a beautiful walk by the side of the water, and every step was bringing forward a nobler fall of ground, or a finer reach of the woods to which they were approaching; but it was some time before Elizabeth was sensible of any of it.’ Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
‘The minuet set Jack’s head wagging with its insistent beat, but he was wholly unconscious of it; and when he felt his hand stirring on his breeches and threatening to take to the air he thrust it under the crook of his knee.’ Master and Commander, Patrick O’Brian
Most stories are quests within a framework of work or love in one form or another, with techniques to escalate the stakes to a satisfying finish. Hobbies can be a side-issue, something to broaden a character’s appeal, or they can be at the heart of the story. If the second, the trick is to fold them in, from the start, so that the hobby itself rapidly becomes a matter of life & death. The British film Brassed Off is a perfect template. The UK’s coal mining industry was being closed down. Many pits had brass bands to help the miners’ breathing and morale, and the band in the film has been spectacularly successful. Two questions interweave: can the band survive closure of the pit, and can the miners themselves survive without work?
More prompts, from books about pastimes:
‘Every instrument employed was severely commented upon; but when he came to the wind, his indignation was terrible.’ Talks with Bandsmen by Algernon Rose, 1894
‘If you landed on a comet, you’d need to keep an eye on its orbit.’ Am I made of Stardust? Maggie Aderin-Pocock
‘Gardeners are born optimists, always looking forward to the year ahead, convinced that they will achieve much more than in the previous year.’ RHS Gardening through the Year by Ian Spence
Or you could sit down with one of your characters for a character chat and ask (writing down the answers as they flow) about their favourite fun things to do. When do they do them? Where? With whom? What are the contexts (teams, times of year etc.)? Is kit involved? Who organises, hosts, starts it all off? The character?(Why/ why not?) How does the character feel about it all? What do they hope for/ want? How’s it going? Why?
Wherever you are, wherever you’re writing, I wish you the very best in 2025 and beyond, and happy writing!
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.
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:
Last Saturday we gathered in Churchill College again to chat about writing and have a scribble or type together. My prompts are in bold – have fun with them:
Mr Robinson’s expense book for May (1845) gives no hint that anything was wrong.
The three hours he had intended to stay stretched into three days.
(both from Daphne Du Maurier’s biography: The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte)
No coward soul is mine
(Title of Emily Bronte’s poem)
From Marion McCready’s poem Ailsa Craig
I write your name on a slip of paper /with a question mark, /place it under my mattress.
Here are the five writing prompts I brought to our first Churchill Writers’ session in person since last November. As usual, I opened books from my shelves at random and chose a line or two, anything at all. The context of the source doesn’t matter, what’s important is that you take a prompt and dance with it whatever way you like. Enjoy the adventure:
‘inside will be a room filled with everyone I love‘ (from Joelle Taylor’s C+nto)
‘the music is big boned, takes up the whole of the dance floor‘ (source ditto)
‘he’s killing the shadow of a life my mother lived before they met‘ (Mothersong by Amy Acre)
‘Shadows on the wall, Noises down the hall‘ (Maya Angelou, Life Doesn’t Frighten Me)
‘I’ve got a magic charm that I keep up my sleeve‘ (source ditto)
Several of the group members said they hadn’t written anything for ages and doubted that they’d be able to produce anything. Well, here they are…
Rosie Johnston 