Tag Archives: short story prompts

Illustration: Martin Parker, Silbercow

He has a voice, a shape, colour, a definite mythology but what else does he have?

Nudge #7 – The Magpie.

Nudge #6 – New

A new year, new thoughts, new shapes and sounds and textures! How does it speak to you? Does it whisper? Sing? Sit in silence? Does it love couplets, long paragraphs, short syllables? Or nothing?

Photo: Martin Parker

Nudge # 5 Foley Sounds.

We scream at the sound of a cabbage being cut in two because we think it’s a head being severed from an unsuspecting body, we look over our shoulders at the sounds of footsteps on gravel not thinking about the empty shoes being trudged through a small tray of grade 2 shale. Sounds fill in the whole picture when we watch films but what sounds are in our heads when we’re writing? What sounds inspire us? If we hear a blade being scraped along another, do we always have to turn to horror? As the days are drawing in, sit back, enjoy this short sound file, close your eyes, then get writing.

Similes

Writing a good simile, one that looks effortless and trips off the tongue like a tongue-trippy-off thing, is an art in itself. Overwrite it and the reader finds themselves thinking things like ‘What? What does that mean?’, write it flat and the nefarious cliché will sneak in and probably cause havoc. Context is also incredibly important when using similes – sometimes you do just need to say ‘tears fell like water’ and ‘the storm hit like a hammer’.

This nudge is to get you thinking about the way you use similes and what you write. We’ve included a few juicy ones to get you thinking.

‘I was cold as a new razor blade’ (L Cohen)

‘The lighthouse looked like a living creature[…] like a seahorse, fragile, impossible but triumphant in the waves’ (J Winterson)

‘Though morning light and evening light come, like echoes, friable as gunfire and faith’ (M Khalvati)

‘His voice reverberated like the slow millstone of London’ (T Hughes)

‘Jotters, exercise books, rulers stacked like grave goods on the shelves’ (S Heaney)

‘Snow pulled back from her hands like mist at sunrise’ (T Pratchett)