Finding Prompts, Using Prompts

In Boot Camp, a favourite method of generating story ideas and triggers for flashes or poems is the prompt set. 

A way of generating industry is to repeat sets of prompts, hour after hour, where the work takes over, the conscious brain runs away and characters, ideas, plots, wonderful themes begin to line up. 

These sessions are called Flash Blasts. 

Our most gruelling Flash Blast was the annual “Children in Need” Marathon, each Autumn where we began at 18:00 on Thursday and finished at midnight Friday.

Yes, thirty hours.

 

When I first experienced writing with prompts, I froze. 

I can’t remember precisely how I eventually broke through, but I know the process was about “letting go”, giving into the words, learning to be, rather than think hard, to sing, to chant, to muddle things around, to swallow, chew and TRUST.

If I look at my short-story anthology "Ballistics" (Salt Publishing) I can recognise stories that came from a prompt set. 

These are First-Prize winners, every one of them. L for Laura came from a silly childhood rhyme where the chant "A for Apple, B for Ball" is subverted:

A for Orses

B for Mutton?

C fer yerself

D fer Payment.

Get it? Hay for Horses… Beef or Mutton?

 

I don’t remember the other prompts, that day, but this “old chestnut”, this silly rhyme connected to me, connected to my deep insides, the gut, where all good stories reside. The place where “Fishy in the Water: Fishy in the Sea” still hide, simmering away with every bad thing I’ve done, every failure I’ve had, all the small joys. Mining the soul is the key to good work.

 

I began:

Ay for orses, remember that? A for orses, B for mutton? C fer yerself, D fer payment? Not sure I could remember it all. I'm not even sure if that's right, A-B-C-D.

 

I had a voice. I could hear a character. Not a dumb man but not worldly either. 

 

Then, instantly, I had the second paragraph.

 

 

A is really for Alice, B for Billy Smith she ran off with.  C is for Clown, me for not noticing. D is for Diane my second, after we had to wait all those years until I was officially deserted.

 

I was off and the story just wrote itself. And won a first prize.

 

In Ballistics there’s “L for Laura”, a story called “An Old Man Watching Football after Sunday Lunch”, one called “The Fucking Point Two”, another called Obelisk and one called “The Quarry”. They are all generated using Flash Prompts. There are other First-Prize winners (like Bunjee) that also came from the same method.  Two other stories “Tomatoes, Flamingos Lemmings” and “Spectacles, Testicles, Wallet & Watch” also came from one-liners, though not actually in a formal Flash Session.

 

I have probably placed fifty stories or flashes that came from prompts. Oh, and at least one Poetry First Prize. The Fucking Point Two came from twenty prompts and every single prompt was in the story. (That is not “advised” but sometimes I do it for the lols.)

So there should be questions:

1       Where do you get your prompts?

 

2       How are prompts generated?

3       How do you get from a prompt or prompts to a story?

4       What happens when you receive a prompt-set? What do you DO?

 

5       Do you use prompts word-for-word, exactly?

6       Do you PLAN your stories?

 

7       If you don’t plan, how do you control what you write?

 

8       Do you edit? Do you work your stories hard?

 

Everywhere; magic; letting-go; sing, muddle, chant, combine; depends; never! The voice, theme, my seething gut; Edit-Schmeddit.

 

 

 

I have to give you a warning now. 

 

I’m about to approach a set of prompts. I am going to talk my way through the generation of the story, flash or poem.

BUT

 

The simple act of telling you means I will break the first rule of Flash Club. You don’t talk about Flash Club.

 

Flashing is all about spontaneity, serendipity, accessing the sub-conscious, not your first kiss but the feel of that first kiss, not cheating, but how cheating felt.

 

If I want to “let go”, be wild, go off-piste, surf the dangerous waves, wander the back-streets and be with the locals, not be a tourist, the LAST thing I must do is talk about the process. The last thing I must do (the thing I mustn’t do) is THINK “so, if I put this here, if I juxtapose that with that, oh, wow!”

 

This is conscious application. (UGH!) This is deliberate plotting versus flying by the seat of the pants; this is head not gut. This produces the ordinary, the obvious, paint-by-numbers “meh” stories.

Oh, sure, you can get that shit published.

 

But I thought you wanted to be a writer, not an author.

I want the process of writing to connect to the hidden me, to reveal my soul occasionally, to truly, genuinely surprise me.

 

So, ideally, I want to be tired, a bit off my head, to have had a big glass of wine, to be on my fifth story of the day, to need the toilet at 3:30 AM, to feel coffee-shock and a churning gut. To open up myself to the universe, not some pathetic, deliberate, mechanical, copycatting word-churn, puke-it-out, tidy, submit.

 

I want horror, joy, confession, pain. To be disturbed, shocked, at the very least surprised.

So, what’s to do? If I tells yer, if I shows yer, I ent really telling yer squat and I is showin’ a copy of a copy through a dark curtain.

Fuck it.

 

First, (this I can tell you, cos it’s semi-conscious). I flick through poetry books, novels, newspapers, books of letters by famous people. I read first lines and last lines and grocery-lists, and fridge-notes. I hear some lying minister prattling on about Covid-19, remember famous sayings, childhood songs. I think of loves and lovers and the ones who got away.

And then I write OPEN lines, ambiguous, “feely” suggestive lines that if twenty people read them will come up with fifteen ideas.

 

You DON’T prompt by saying: “Write a story about a repressed, spinsterish school-teacher sitting at her desk and looking at pictures of naked men. Her name is Agatha Astley and it’s her 42^ndbirthday…”

TBF I could probably write that story, right now. 

 

(Because I wrote the “bad” prompt as an example but “let the badness come”. 

 

I didn’t THINK as I generated that bad idea, so accidentally I had a reasonable one! I think that’s called Sod’s Law.

 

Aside

Sometimes, say I have Covid-19 or something, I can’t get the prompts out, so I ask a trusted lieutenant, and BOY do they go wrong.

 

You get lists like:

A Chocolate-Coated Brillo Pad

An elephant’s Eyeball on Ice

Jenny Every forgets her knickers

 

What if the PM was a Robot?

 

Do you actually know what’s wrong with these prompts? Aren’t they “wild”?

 

Yes-but, no-but. They are trying to be silly, trying to be wild. The author is all over the prompts. They don’t unleash the reader-writers, they contain them, restrict them, push them into narrow alleyways.

Using prompts must be a natural, spontaneous thing. So also is their creation.

It’s like note-booking. You need to record whatever it was that tweaked you, in Waitrose, record enough to be able to find the idea again in a month’s time, but NOT be so exact that the idea becomes cold. You need to be oblique.

 

When I was a flat-out, full-time writer, instead of using a notebook I had a huge white-board. On to this would go “spikeys”, and “fuzzies”, words or phrases that were supposed to keep ideas alive in my gut, but MOVING in my gut, not fixed, not turning into concrete (or worse, into clichés) but combining and recombining in ways I could not imagine.

 

So, don’t be deliberate, don’t be conscious, don’t try too hard, both in the collecting of prompts or (if we ever get round to it) using the bloody things.

 

Over the last few days I have been turning to a couple of Bloodaxe Books, Being Alive and Being Human.

 

These are filled with poems. So easy, right, just copy a line from a poem. Do that 25 times and you have 25 prompts.

 

Well, yeah, except, if you do that, your fellow-writers will critique and just love certain phrases“This being human is a guesthouse” (Rumi) or “Let us go then, you and I” (T S Eliot) and  “When the evening is spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherised upon a table…”

 

Instead, read such a great line and rewrite it on the fly, or “respond to it”. Maybe you’d scribble a prompt like: Being alive, like in a Bridlington B&B in November” or “OK? Yeah sure, OK like being in Bridlington in November…”

 

You can use exact lines (I post them in quotes). Maybe a character thinks the line or quotes the line. Such lines have a lot of power.

 

I have never read T S Eliot’s biography, but he probably learned Greek and or Latin, knew his Shakespeare and Chaucer was brought up on Longfellow, Poe.

Every single bloody word he wrote, every one carries the DNA of everywhere he’s been, everything he’s read from Beowulf to Billy Bunter.

But you don’t pick that up, breathe that in by being conscious, you have to eat, savour, roll the stuff around, look from the corners of your eyes.

You have to let him, and all who helped him to be him, get inside your mind, not directly thinking, not analysing, but allowing yourself to be infected.

 

Here are today’s double-set of prompts. (I had visions of writing half a dozen flashes today but got diverted to this!)

A story beginning:   "McLintock was up for the fight. He called us through"

 

A story ending:  "On the whole, though, I liked him"

 

Play Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" on repeat and then write

 

Google "Pickled Spanners" and follow links until you get a hit. Then write.

One-two-three-five-six

Later, as I lay in the dark

Waitrose

What it was was money, what it was was waste

Horse Sense

 

Pine Needles

Imagine if we had souls

TURNIP

Bow to the saints, but do not prostrate yourself

It's all a matter of perspective

 

How was it? Before? After?

Bluff!

Finally, I can feel it. It is turning

"Is there anybody there?".

When the child is a father

OK! OK! OK! OK! OK!!!!!

 

The Ice-Age is Over. I'm remarried now.

Late Tuesday

TRUFFLES

I am your ancestor, hi.

I have this feeling that there's a hole in my head

 

Perishable

What could be prettier?

I would rather be cheated than not trust

Looking back on what has been

There has always been a problem with the wog

 

The cows wind slowly home

Matchstick Women, Matchstick Kids

How blood surrenders

Earphones

Like a hungry bear in the bushes

 

The streets are cold, the houses dark

Come, child, see the sun as it moves to sleep

Cut off the telephone

Music will return, it always does

I begin with a sketched outline

 

The boats pulled high out of the water

I don't like Tuesdays

Diamond!

Carrying the cake

Let's try this backwards

 

So easily doth love depart, so sudden.

Friends, let us drink ourselves to death

 

 

So what does the conscious flasher do? Maybe he grabs that (pretty crap) opener: McLintock was up for the fight. He called us through

 

Sure we could manage a story from there (but I would say that INSTANTLY the setting and the voice limits the story to genre or near genre with a maximum score of about 110.

The point is YOU DON’T HAVE TO PHYSICALLY USE THE EXACT WORDS.

Maybe you copy them or type them, pause, think, “Hmmm, the voice limits the story to genre or near genre with a maximum score of about 110 and that’s just not good enough…”

 

I asked Jones who could help. He suggested Tom McLintock. If there’s anyone prepared to die for the cause it’s McLintock. You want me to ring him?

 

I could squeeze 125 out of that.

Too many flashers (ooooer) are far too literal, too deliberate. They grab at the first prompt that “might work” instead of eating the lot six times, putting the prompts in a different order, singing them, rolling them around, pairing them up, making them antagonise each other. This last act can be amazing. 

Two ordinary prompts, not even distant cousins can come together and explode in the head.

 

A story ending: "On the whole, though, I liked him"

 

 

I always cut and paste this to the end of the prompt list. I doubt I use such an idea one in a hundred times. If I do use it, I’d be thinking in some vague subversive or sarcastic or inverting way like the last couplet of a sonnet. I might be thinking, (very, very loosely) that the story’s bulk would be, for example, about a serial killer or a fraudster, or a Tory (I hate Tories) and the ending was a flip.

Then I might never use the flip. That’s the point! It’s a bit like: “Well, yes, Mrs Lincoln, but apart from that what did you think of the play?”

 

We usually have Opening, Closing, Song as “extras” apart from the prompts. I’m trying to mess with your head.

 

Play Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" on repeat and then write.

Playing songs ON REPEAT until they start to eat your brain from the inside can have a great effect. What you write might not be “from” the song or “about” the song or “reacting to” the song. You MIGHT be writing the darkest thing you ever wrote while playing The Birdy Song, over and over and over. Learn to fuck with your head. Get away from stock stories about coming of age or the school bully/ring-leader. Disturb me! (and yourself).

 

Think of songs that really have a mood, a feel. Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah, lots of stuff by Leonard Cohen, Who Wants to Live Forever by Queen. Try songs that have always given you a tickle in the gut. Hey Jude, Ob-la-di, Ob-la-dah!

 

BUT just because when XXXX was playing you lost your virginity doesn’t mean you play and then write about “losing it”. Instead use the gut-sense from that night, but write something fresh.

 

Google "Pickled Spanners" and follow links until you get a hit. Then write.

 

Let’s try this. We get, immediately

 

Spanner Crab Omelette. >>>

Spanners (A Film) >>>

Rudolph Spanner, some German guy >>>

Ball Joint Tools: O’Reilly’s Auto-Parts >>>

Wrench (Wiki) >>>
Watch ACME Slutty Fear Pussy Hunting House (WTF?!!) >>>

Definition of Spanner >>>

100 Most Beautiful Slang Phrases >>>

The Ten Best Pickled Onion Recipes >>>

Time-Spanner: Pickled Culture >>>

That is just Page One on Google. I can see ten stories there, probably twenty. Now imagine O’Reilly is a gastronome. Twenty-One.

 

It’s this easy. IF YOU LET GO.

 

Very recently I wrote a story I’d score around 140 and that I fully expect to win a good prize. It came from Googling a few random letters and numbers.

I would never, EVER, have found that story by “thinking”.

 

 

The Prompts

 

One-two-three-five-six

Later, as I lay in the dark

Waitrose

What it was was money, what it was was waste

Horse Sense

Pine Needles

Imagine if we had souls

TURNIP

Bow to the saints, but do not prostrate yourself

It's all a matter of perspective

How was it? Before? After?

Bluff!

Finally, I can feel it. It is turning

"Is there anybody there?".

When the child is a father

OK! OK! OK! OK! OK!!!!!

The Ice-Age is Over. I'm remarried now.

Late Tuesday

TRUFFLES

I am your ancestor, hi.

I have this feeling that there's a hole in my head

Perishable

What could be prettier?

I would rather be cheated than not trust

Looking back on what has been

There has always been a problem with the wog

The cows wind slowly home

Matchstick Women, Matchstick Kids

How blood surrenders

Earphones

Like a hungry bear in the bushes

The streets are cold, the houses dark

Come, child, see the sun as it moves to sleep

Cut off the telephone

Music will return, it always does

I begin with a sketched outline

The boats pulled high out of the water

I don't like Tuesdays

Diamond!

Carrying the cake

Let's try this backwards

So easily doth love depart, so sudden.

Friends, let us drink ourselves to death

 

Don’t dive in, read them all, a minimum of twice, ideally four times. Then put them in alphabetical order and read again. How about in reverse?

"Is there anybody there?".

Bluff!  Carrying the cake

Bow to the saints, but do not prostrate yourself

Come, child, see the sun as it moves to sleep

Cut off the telephone    Diamond!     Earphones

Finally, I can feel it. It is turning

Friends, let us drink ourselves to death

Horse Sense     How blood surrenders

How was it? Before? After?    I am your ancestor, hi.

I begin with a sketched outline

I don't like Tuesdays    Imagine if we had souls

I have this feeling that there's a hole in my head

I would rather be cheated than not trust

It's all a matter of perspective    Late Tuesday

Later, as I lay in the dark

Let's try this backwards

Like a hungry bear in the bushes

Looking back on what has been

Matchstick Women, Matchstick Kids

Music will return, it always does

OK! OK! OK! OK! OK!!!!!    One-two-three-five-six

Perishable          Pine Needles

So easily doth love depart, so sudden.

The boats pulled high out of the water

The cows wind slowly home

The Ice-Age is Over. I'm remarried now.

The streets are cold, the houses dark

There has always been a problem with the wog

TRUFFLES     TURNIP     Waitrose

What could be prettier?

What it was was money, what it was was waste

When the child is a father

 

I just alphabeticised it, brought a few shorter lines up to save space.

 

BTW avoid starting with, "Is there anybody there?" is very rarely a good thing to start with unattributed dialogue, and it’s a cliché.

 

Could you use it? Sure. Oh, wasn’t there a dark prompt somewhere?

 

I don't like Tuesdays, it’s my turn on evening patrol. The streets are always cold, the houses dark as death. I want to whistle but I can’t. I want to cry out “Is anybody there?” but I can’t.

 

You couldn’t continue that?

 

Sometimes I will ‘toy with prompts, “playing”, staying loose. I look for prompts that feel like they ought to go together.

 

TRUFFLES     TURNIP     Waitrose

 

How was it? Before? After?    I am your ancestor, hi.

 

The boats pulled high out of the water, the cows wind slowly home

 

The boats are pulled high out of the water, the cows wind slowly home. Is a bloody good opener to a story. It has a feel to it, twilight, pastoral, heavy.

 

As 90% of a story is in creating the opening, I could write that story now. I would introduce a named character, a fisherman, maybe the landlord of the pub, dunno.

 

It is late, the soft, last light. The boats are pulled high out of the water, the cows have wound slowly home. Arthur taps his second pipe of the day, looks up to see the dog waiting for him on the harbour wall.

 

Tuck in!

 

 

Or

 

Sometimes I have this feeling that there's a hole in my head. I try to explain. I begin with a sketched outline, me, my head, a picture of lightning, smoke from my ears. I point.

 

Or

 

So easily doth love depart, so sudden. Come, child, see the sun as it moves to sleep. Be quiet now, be calm.

3,526 Words

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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