About Prompts. Finding Stories

Some of my best work, most of my best in the last three years has come from randomness, a chance remark overheard, an odd image seen, but most typically from a Boot Camp flash prompt, or from a response to a poem.

Poems, by the way, a very good ways into a fresh idea. Reading a poem does not mean that when you respond you will write a prose version of the poem, or steal the idea, or "answer it."

Poems have that way of breaking through the skin, getting round your defences, slipping past the guardians of the (boring, up-front) psyche. Meat and life and joy (and pain) but always living is back there in the darkness, the unconscious. Find a way to get access.

When I want to come at my life at a tangent, find a different way in, see afresh, break the shackles, I read a poem, read smatterings of stories, look at pictures, or listen to random music. Even simply reading titles of books, looking at the spines, the colours, sensing what is within can rekindle deeply-set ideas, slowly awaken the unusual, the freshly-connected.

I believe that the more obviously we think, the more conventionally, consciously, logically, the more left-brained, the less interesting our work will become. I dislike carefully plotted, highly-researched work. I dislike the mechanical and perfectly-formed. What I want and need is surprise, shock, difference, the unexpected, the words or view that shake the tree make us see the world in another way.

If we read of a racist he's a bigot or a Nazi. Is he or she usually a beautiful, sensitive, loving person (who just hates a race or a colour)? What if we juxtapose these unusual combinations? Remember in Schindler's List (I think) where the vicious commandant listened to Mozart? The music heightened the horror, made us think, "It is not impossible, I could be like that."

Beginners paint things in black and white, they write stock characters, stereotypes and clichés. It's when we break away from these that we begin to see anew, to threaten to disturb the reader. Clichés wash over us. We "know" they don't matter too much. We don't need to pay attention. After all, we know what this means, right? We've seen it all before.

Even when we are intermediate writers or well-published, "established" writers, it's so easy to drift into obvious, overdone plots, easy to have characters everybody expects. One reason I use prompts is to randomly-associate, to make my mind leap about, to force connections which would NOT come conventionally, "typically" or in an everyday way.

I grab a few poetry collections and pinch lines. Sometimes these are direct takes, often I change a word or embellish on the fly. The point is the line is near random (but it has caught my eye or ear so perhaps not TOTALLY random, and of course I bought the book, so again, there's something deeply wanted…)

A fat, furry bluebottle.
And of course the passengers were right…
Dear Doctor X, if I may call you that
Do you want to know a secret?

These few are this morning's list, not even posted (and somehow I know not as good a list as usual as I'm off for the weekend and rushing.) I've already forgotten where they've come from (some of them.) I think the first three there are from a new paperback "This is Not Chick Lit" the next (I know) is a song title.


Everything is Too Loud
Fuck off Noah, fucking Doom Merchant
He was flicking through Gay & Lesbian Literature.
Hours and days and weeks and months, I worked on my persona

Top one here is a song title, the next was prompted by a song but is a spontaneous original. Strong, more definite prompts like this are actually a bit too "channelling" for my tastes. They tend, if used to force the writer towards a specific story. The gay line was prompted by the start of a story in TINCL but wasn't there. I made it up. The fourth is a stretched version of a line from a short-story in Seventh Quark

How can you expect to be taken seriously?
How you remind me
I am so cold. My bones are cold.
I met Adam in a bookstore.

Song, song, 7Q short, TINCL, the one that gave me the gay line.

I might have been a potter
I volunteered for Monday Nights.
I was saying how unusual your case is.
It was a very unlucky way to get dead

Random, set off by something, a distorted view from TINCL, random, random. By random I mean that as I copy others' words I often get a line "pop up"

It's been well-researched. It's guaranteed.
It's just a story. It doesn't have to be true.
It's not the end of the world
Max always shrugged off the idea of marriage

Random, random, song-title, extracted from a story by Lois Peterson

Michael Jackson's Dick
My second cousin's friend's step-father
Not for all of it, not for nothing
Outside McDonalds

The title of a Steve Almond story (was in 7Q), random, random, random. I should say here that the percentage of "randoms" is way, WAY higher than an average day's prompts.
Passing Through Smoke
Peaches
Perhaps I should introduce myself. I am an attorney for…
Save the life of my child, cried the desperate mother

Title of a 7Q story, song, a spam email, words from a Simon & Garfunkel song.

Seagulls fling themselves against the shifting winds
She is whirling, whirling.
She rummages in her purse
Some people thought you were from Jamaica

Excerpt from "Baby Beluga" by Lois Peterson, excerpt from a 7Q flash by Hazera Forth, ditto, excerpt from a story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Spotted East of
The carousel is old.
The Night Has a Thousand Eyes
The thing about making love to an alien is –

Half the title of a 7Q introduction, snippet of a 7Q story, song title, random.

The voices of old people
There are so many people, all tired and hunched over.
There was a terrorist on the plane, but
There's someone at the door

Prompted by Simon & Garfunkels "Old Friends", extract from a 7Q prize-winning story called "Sugar-Sticks" by Nancy Saunders, a random memory, random.

To all the girls I loved before
Today her brother rang
Walk Don't Run
We said we'd meet in Santa Monica

Song, random, song, from a chicklit story.

Who wants to live forever?
You could buy me a burger
You smiled lightly when they asked you those questions
You thought everybody in America had a car and a gun

Song. Play that Queen song on repeat, turn off your screen and write-write-write! Random, extract from Adichie, ditto.

Usually, definitely, around a third of my prompts will be poetry. Usually I will have opening lines from famous stories or novels (sometimes altered so as not to instantly make us think "Macomber", or whatever) sometimes not.

I also use letters. These are great. Simply copy a paragraph of a letter then use a carriage return to break it up, cut away a few words so the lines stand alone…

Then when I have all these prompts (plus once the wording of a snotty email, once my electricity bill) I sort them alphabetically. This "breaks the connections". Sometimes I will cut and past half a dozen prompts from the beginning to the middle. Just randomise, stop the brain making conscious choices.

Now how to get the story?

I read the whole thing top to bottom read bottom to top, read top to bottom. I am trying hard NOT to want to grab that prompt and go. What I am trying to do is allow all the prompts individually to "talk to me", prompts in pairs and triplets to "whisper". I am also hoping that the back-stories from those prompts are building connections, pressures deep in me.

Maybe that song title reminds me of a night. But that line from that story WITH the memory makes me think of a new way of connecting the world, a less obvious way. And these two with the drumming of that line of poetry there, and vague thoughts about Nigerian widows wanting to give me money, and and and…

I hold off as long as I can but now what I'm feeling for, waiting for is SOUND. I and trying to tune in to the musical and aural sense of an opening which just feels and sounds right. Am I going to write something sad, poignant, aggressive, lyrical? What does my soul want to do? (If I can get my BRAIN out of the way!)

I read through, mutter, wander, trying to be "struck" by a line, a juxtaposition. Usually 1-2-3-4 phrases will begin to glow. One might be from an ending I have no idea about, one from the middle, two (together) with a memory might be ready to form my story's start.

When you find a feeling, a voice:

After the service, some time well into the wake, I stepped outside.

They are queuing for their pensions when love strikes. It comes out of nowhere.


Dear, let me explain how it happens. There is clarity, but the moment of absolute clarity is brief, the world that was, the world that is to be, is mostly dark confusion.

I am eating a breakfast egg and listening to Otis Redding. When Otis sings "My Girl" I feel sorry for myself. I think about Kathy.

I would like to pretend this is a dream. I am in a country of bright, perfect light. I am with ALL my family, my brother, four sisters, Pat, Jenny, Barbara, Angela, my mother, my father. It's summer, the kind that as a child you thought belonged to you, was made for you. We even have a dog.

We are in a dim, hot, airless room with the blinds all closed, me and Albert Typo and Albert is making tea. He has already put out precisely seven chocolate biscuits, and one is wrapped in gold foil.

This is a story in which nothing need happen particularly, but it does. This story had a happy ending but it changed. It was going to be too long. It is about suffering.


Evelyn, dear, I thank you most kindly for your wonderful letter. I am sorry to see that it is still tough going out there, (I am sending you this little cheque) but at least you have good weather and open spaces. But Evelyn, when you write, "Oh, to be in England!" I am horrified, and I must speak to you both candidly and most urgently.

On October 14th 1998 I bought a fishing rod, some bait, a licence, a small fisherman's stool, and a keep-net.
A keep net is to keep a fish, in a net (in the water) so either you let the fish go at the end of the fishing day, or finally you kill it and take it home to your wife who will open it up, gut it, cook it, and then say it tastes of mud.


All of these are recent Boot Camp openings (first drafts) (not necessarily mine) but what matters is that they surprise the writer a little, take him or her on a journey that is not typical or expected. What matters is (I think) that just that opening carries the message, the story's "feel" its intent, the direction. It's a combination of seemingly random prompts that have interacted with the author's life, his/her psyche, his/her future, his/her needs, his/her education., religion, love-life to produce something NEW.

(Rushed not yet edited. Apologies.)