Monday, 8 February 2010
Today's book is one that I've only actually had in my possession for a few hours. It's called "The Writer's Book of Matches - 1001 Prompts to Ignite Your Fiction".
Like I say it arrived in the post a few hours ago, but already I love it. There are three kinds of prompt in the book. Situational, Dialogue, and Assignments.
Situational Prompts give you a brief description of a situation to inspire you. For example, 'A priest is attacked for being a paedophile. He is innocent of the crime, but guilty of something worse' or 'During her first trip to Las Vegas, a woman experiences the luckiest night of her life'. These all seem designed to make you think. What is the priest really guilty of? Why is he being accused of paedophilia? Will he let them find him guilty of that crime to hide the other? What does the 'luckiest night' mean? Did she win a lot of money? Did she fall in love? Did she find something to give her a new start in life - a job, an opportunity, a contact?
Dialogue prompts are exactly that, a line of dialogue, without context. For example, 'Look, somebody has got to make a decision' or 'You know, they invented a word for guys like him'. You have complete freedom to decide who is speaking, who they're talking to, what the context is.
Assignments are a bit more detailed. They describe a situation and then ask you to write about different takes on it. For example, 'You accidentally overhear a conversation between two people you have never met. The topic of the conversation shocks and dismays you. Write about these conversations and describe how you respond to the content: a conversation between two stockbrokers; a conversation between a priest and a member of his parish; a conversation between a woman and the man with whom she is cheating on her husband.' I find these much less inspiring, but they're outnumbered by the other two types so I'm not particularly worried.
The idea is to write something every day and to get into the habit of writing. As the book says, if you do one prompt a day you have over three years worth of prompts, but not content with that they give suggestions in the appendices for remixing the prompts so you can use them multiple times. There are a set of variation tables which you can choose suggestions from or roll a dice to get ideas at random, varying the gender or age of the protagonist, the setting and era and so forth.
There are also suggestions for varying individual prompts. For example, it suggests you take the prompt 'A man decides his daughter's career is getting in the way of her getting married and takes matters into her own hands' and instead of writing from the father's perspective, which is the obvious take on the prompt, write from the daughter's or from someone else's - like her mother or her boyfriend.
All in all I think this book is a great way of finding inspiration when you're lacking it and I heartily recommend it.
Links
Randomly generated writing prompts.
Writer's Digest Prompts.
Writing Prompt Generator - I love this one, it's great fun.
One Word - this one's amusing too.
Themed Writing Challenges on Livejournal
Like I say it arrived in the post a few hours ago, but already I love it. There are three kinds of prompt in the book. Situational, Dialogue, and Assignments.
Situational Prompts give you a brief description of a situation to inspire you. For example, 'A priest is attacked for being a paedophile. He is innocent of the crime, but guilty of something worse' or 'During her first trip to Las Vegas, a woman experiences the luckiest night of her life'. These all seem designed to make you think. What is the priest really guilty of? Why is he being accused of paedophilia? Will he let them find him guilty of that crime to hide the other? What does the 'luckiest night' mean? Did she win a lot of money? Did she fall in love? Did she find something to give her a new start in life - a job, an opportunity, a contact?
Dialogue prompts are exactly that, a line of dialogue, without context. For example, 'Look, somebody has got to make a decision' or 'You know, they invented a word for guys like him'. You have complete freedom to decide who is speaking, who they're talking to, what the context is.
Assignments are a bit more detailed. They describe a situation and then ask you to write about different takes on it. For example, 'You accidentally overhear a conversation between two people you have never met. The topic of the conversation shocks and dismays you. Write about these conversations and describe how you respond to the content: a conversation between two stockbrokers; a conversation between a priest and a member of his parish; a conversation between a woman and the man with whom she is cheating on her husband.' I find these much less inspiring, but they're outnumbered by the other two types so I'm not particularly worried.
The idea is to write something every day and to get into the habit of writing. As the book says, if you do one prompt a day you have over three years worth of prompts, but not content with that they give suggestions in the appendices for remixing the prompts so you can use them multiple times. There are a set of variation tables which you can choose suggestions from or roll a dice to get ideas at random, varying the gender or age of the protagonist, the setting and era and so forth.
There are also suggestions for varying individual prompts. For example, it suggests you take the prompt 'A man decides his daughter's career is getting in the way of her getting married and takes matters into her own hands' and instead of writing from the father's perspective, which is the obvious take on the prompt, write from the daughter's or from someone else's - like her mother or her boyfriend.
All in all I think this book is a great way of finding inspiration when you're lacking it and I heartily recommend it.
Links
Randomly generated writing prompts.
Writer's Digest Prompts.
Writing Prompt Generator - I love this one, it's great fun.
One Word - this one's amusing too.
Themed Writing Challenges on Livejournal
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