The power of writing prompts

This week I've been to two events where I've done some instant writing from given prompts.  On Tuesday night I joined a new group for a relaxed few hours in a lovely cafe, writing and talking. 

This was the first time I'd been to this group, but the previous week the members had taken home postcards based around the old children's reading books 'Janet and John' as prompts for short pieces of writing.  Several of the pieces echoed the style of the new series of spoof Ladybird books written for adults.  These have what seems like text written for children, but on closer inspection it often includes adult innuendoes, and cynical comments on contemporary topics.

One piece took the writer off to the zoo, along with innuendoes involving snakes and their sexy keeper. Another piece incorporated a humorous swipe at the phenomenon of mansplaining.  From simple cards with quite innocent illustrations, a wide variety of different narratives arose.

On that evening we used the prompts of ration books, thinking about when food was scarce, and about sweets we ate as children.  This prompt threw my memories back to when I was eight or nine  and my parents bought what they called a 'corner shop'.  This was back in the mid-1950s, before the appearance of supermarkets, and the shop was, in effect a mini-supermarket.  They sold tinned fruit and veg, sliced up ham and other cold meats with one of those lethal circular slicing blades, and sold individual sweets.

I remember the big rectangular tin trays the sweets were displayed on.  They were individually wrapped, and there must have been dozens of sweets on each tray.  One was the 1d tray, the other the 2d tray.  This was in 'old money', before decimalisation in Britian.  I could clearly recalls those trays  of sweets some fifty years later.

The second event I went to was titled Coastal Conversations, and invited writers to explore their relationship to the coast.  I ended up writing a piece from the viewpoint of an oyster shell.  I told how it protected a soft, defenceless creature, how it stuck in the mud of the seabed, filter-feeding on tiny plankton, and cleaning the water as it did.

I'm about to finish the first draft of my current novel, which contains sentient trees, and I'm thinking about writing from their viewpoint in the second draft.  So writing as an oyster shell is good practice for that rewrite.

Comments

Popular Posts