Get Writing – Prompts & Tips
There’s no set theme for this competition, it’s completely open. We’re looking for the work you’re most proud of, and recommend taking the time to polish it to be the best it can be. Careful editing can be the difference between something good becoming something great. Whether poetry, flash fiction or stories (including script style) are your thing, we’ve put together plenty of inspiration, writing prompts and resources below to help you along with your writing.
What we’re looking for: Imagination, originality and good flow. Be it poetry or short story (narrative scripts are also welcome), we want to be surprised, moved and captivated by your ideas and how you bring them to life. We want fresh language rather than cliché. Show us through sensory detail rather than telling us everything. Let the reader make their own imaginative connections. Excite us! Make us laugh, make us cry, scare us, or maybe just make us think.
If you’re after inspiration, check out our Photo Inspiration Gallery on Flickr, plus the downloadable resources, prompts & inspiration below, covering everything from sparking ideas to editing.
Sometimes a great piece of writing comes out almost fully formed; more often, careful editing helps you find the right balance. Either way, once you’ve written something you think is good, give yourself time to make it better with our Final Edit Checklist, which you can also download below.
Keep reading for all sorts of helpful stuff, including a big list of writing exercises. You could try one a day for a week and see where you end up!
DOWNLOADS
1. Resources, prompts & inspiration
2. Photo Inspiration Gallery
3. Final Edit Checklist
Jump to:
About the Competition
Guidelines & How to enter
Flash Fiction & Short Story
“A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” Lorrie Moore
Flash fiction tends to be the name given to stories under 500 words. For short stories, whether flash or a bit longer…
Don’t get too epic! Although 2,000 words (the maximum for this competition) is quite a lot, avoid trying to fit in too much or too many characters. Short stories aren’t novels and are often most effective when they zoom in on one particular scene or moment. This might be a key part of a bigger story, or the only moment that exists in your imagination. Either way, it will usually be more effective than trying to squeeze in an epic story and relying on info-dumping to get it told.
There are many things we don’t have to know, or that you can simply allude to where needed. William Trevor says of the short story, its “strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more.” Trust your reader to make some connections without you spelling everything out. Think about what is essential to the story you’ve written and what will bring it off the page. The rest can go.
Start in the action – as close to the end as possible, so we’re jumping in at an exciting point. Very often our first few paragraphs are us warming up and contain too much description and explaining. When you edit, check whether you’ve implied enough through the story for the reader to understand anything important you’ve cut from the beginning.
Poetry & Spoken Word
All styles of poetry are welcome. The only thing we’re not keen on is poems written for the sake of rhyme rather than the content. Poetry, of course, can rhyme, but rhyme should never be forced (what rhymes with pain… sane, brain etc.). We often see more predictable and clichéd language with forced rhyme too, where you can see what’s coming next (like in a greeting card message!).
Rhythm, on the other hand, and the sound of words are important in a poem, so it’s always a good idea to speak your poem aloud and listen to the way it flows when you edit. Better still, record it on your phone and listen back when you’re not looking at the page and can focus just on the words and sounds.
You can write something focused on being heard or read aloud, where sound is a key part (but don’t be a slave to it), or something written for the page, where line breaks and stanzas are particularly important. Or you can write with both in mind!
Bringing ideas and concepts into the real world through concrete imagery can strengthen your poem and conjure visuals in the mind’s eye. For example, you could make grief, anger or love (abstract ideas that are difficult to pin down) into an actual person. What do they look like? How do they speak? What would they say or wear?
Unlike a story, a poem doesn’t need a narrative structure, although it can have one.
Top tips
Read your work aloud as you edit to help tune into the ‘voice’ of the poem or story, but never try to sound like a ‘writer’. It’s your own authentic voice and perception of the world we want to hear (so no AI please). If you’re writing in character, think about how they would really think and speak.
One of the things that makes a piece of writing better is recognising the energy in a piece or idea and running with that over anything else. If it interests you as the writer, chances are it will interest a reader. Take risks, try things out – you never know where they might lead.
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” Robert Frost
Remember, even if it’s poetry, you’re creating rather than simply reporting fact. Whether you’re travelling to the moon or writing about real happenings and experiences, you can fictionalise through art. You make the rules and can even control the weather! You don’t need to be married to the truth to tell a truth. You might change something real – a name, colour, place or the outcome of an event – because it works better for the piece.
Using the Photo Gallery: If you’re using inspiration from the photo gallery, don’t worry about where or when an image was taken – you can decide that yourself. If you end up moving it to another country, or even another planet, that’s fine too. You might not know what a particular image is about, which is great because you can interpret it in your own way. As a writer, you’re here to imagine your own conclusions about the contents of a photo and the bigger picture you can’t see.
Have fun and check out the resources below to help you get writing!
DOWNLOADS
1. Resources, prompts & inspiration
2. Photo Inspiration Gallery
3. Final Edit Checklist
Jump to:
About the Competition
Guidelines & How to enter