get writing

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Use the photographs on this page to inspire you or choose an exercise and just do it!

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Exercise 10

Folkways: Read this poem by Caribbean poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite and write your own Folkways poem.

From Wikipedia: "Folkways is a technical term in sociology to describing the patterns of conventional behavior in a society, norms that apply to everyday matters. They are the conventions and habits learned from childhood.Generally, conformity to folkways is ensured by gentle social pressure and imitation. Breaking or questioning a folkway does not cause severe punishment, but may cause the person to be laughed at, frowned upon, or scolded. Some examples of folkways in western culture include respecting the privacy of strangers and eating food with the proper utensil".

Exercise 9

Take a newspaper, cut out photographs that catch your eye and cut out headlines. Mis-match the headlines to the photographs - and make the two meet in a credible poem or story. The more mis-matched the better for eg. put the headline "More Will Die" with a photograph from London Fashion Week, or "Pair arrested over Scam" with a wildlife photograph of two birds.

Exercise 8

Synaesthesia is the condition of joining together of sensations that are normally experienced separately - like experiencing colours when reading or hearing words or experiencing tastes, smells, shapes or touches in almost any combination. Describe your home, a holiday, a journey in the way you'd imagine a synaesthete would.

Exercise 7

Choose two of your favourite poems - they should be as different as possible - a sonnet and free verse, rhyming and non-rhyming, with different feels and different subject matters. Photocopy or print the poems. Cut them into smaller sections - single words or pairs of words or short lines. Rearrange them to create the beginnings of a new poem - add your own lines to complete your masterpiece.

Exercise 6

Write about somewhere you used to live. Describe the house in detail. Everything that you can remember from the colour of the bathroom to the plants in the front garden. Now use it as a setting for a story. Take some characters that you have created and let them live there.

(from "The Creative Writing Coursebook" - edited by Julia Bell and Paul Magrs).

Exercise 5

Choose three unrelated words and google them. Choose one of the resulting sites to use as a starting point for a poem or short story

Exercise 4

Begin with the line "I remember" (or "I don't remember"), and write for fifteen minutes.

Exercise 3

From a cutting in the Independent Newspaper: "Theme Park Workers who are starting to dismantle the Corkscrew ride at Alton Towers have found 800 pieces of jewellery, 300 mobile phones, 10 pairs of underwear, a false leg, a prosthetic ear and 53 odd shoes." Be one of these items and write about your time before your fall from grace.

Exercise 2

Think of someone from your past - someone with a fairly common first name. Write a paragraph about them: who they are, what they like, what they look like.

Think of someone else with the same name - someone you know now, or work with. Write a brief paragraph about them.

Choose another person with the same name - someone famous, or in the media ....

Find someone on the internet with the same name, someone you don't know and jot down their details - real or made up....

Then, in a short story bring these people together, introduce them to each other - one at a time, or all together - choose a single location (an airport, a hospital, a brothel) or take them into each other's worlds one at a time. Give them new names or keep them all with the same name.

Exercise 1

Fold a piece of paper lengthwise in half. On the left hand side of the fold write a list of 20 nouns. On the right hand side, and with the paper folded so you cannot see the other list, write 20 favourite adjectives. Open the list - to reveal some (hopefully) interesting pairings. Choose your favourite(s) and write a poem.

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