Five Top Tips to Prompt a New Writing Idea by Kathryn Evans

It's almost September, the start of a new academic year, so here are some ways to kick start some new ideas.

TOP TIP ONE - What If?

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Ideas come from everywhere.

With an open mind you can pick up ideas like a magpie picks up shiny things.
The ideas behind my book More of Me came from:

1. Looking at old photographs of my daughter and wishing I could have kept all the previous versions of her - toddler Emily, six-year-old Emily, twelve-year-old Emily - maybe not fifteen-year-old Emily, that version was quite hard work.

2. And from observing the weird ways some insects reproduce - notably, aphids - what if that was exploited by science?

3. Remembering what it was like to be sixteen and feeling your life was being controlled by your parents - what if it really was?


These seem like random ideas but they came together to make an award-winning novel that was nominated for the Carnegie medal.

My new novel, Beauty Sleep, came from similar apparently disparate thoughts.

1. What if a girl from the eighties suddenly had to cope in a world where she's inundated with social media?

2. What if homelessness became a crime?

3. What if a great beauty product held a dark secret?


You'll see those two small but important words that are at the heart of every writer's work:

What If?

So that's my first and most important tip - build the question what if into everything you see/do/hear:

What if I'm doing the washing up and the drain expands and sucks me in?

What if I go to bed and when I wake up, I'm in a different century? ( I might write this one!)

What if my puppy gets bigger and BIGGER and BIGGER?

You get the idea. Hopefully.

Top Tip Two- If you're stuck, cheat.

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Use story prompt websites. They aren't really cheating, they're just lighting a match under your ready to burn tinder. Reddit is great :

https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/

But there are dozens of these sites - have a google and find one that works for you.

TOP TIP THREE - Use some Imagination tools.

Okay, this is kind of like Top Tip Two but I just confessed to cheating and you can NEVER trust a writer.

Story Cubes: I've never used them but I know someone who has and got a book deal out of it! Jill Atkins threw a torch, an open book, and a keyhole. She wrote a story called Grandad's Magic Torch and Franklin Watts are publishing it for their Reading Champions series in April 2020. Jill has written over 100 books, so if it's good enough for her, it's good enough for me.

Prompt Cards: I have a stack of cards with about thirty characters, inciting incidents and decisions a character makes to prompt in writing workshops and they ALWAYS spark loads of ideas.  It takes the pressure off to be given a trigger and quite often the writer rejects the card in favour of something else it's sparked off.

Other Writing: Dipping into history books,  guides for tourist sites, science magazines, myth and legend books will all fire something in your brain, guaranteed. Even practical writing books can help, Marie Basting, author of the fabulous debut Princess BMX, says:

When I was unsure where to go with new project, I read 'Stealing Hollywood' by Alex Sokoloff which really got me back on track.

TOP TIP FOUR - Talk to other writers.

Teaming up with other writers is a great source of support, encouragement, and stimulation. I was stuck on a story when I went to my monthly SCBWi writers group and they made a couple of suggestions that turned my story around. Give the girl a friend and give her a magic way out. I tore up the script I'd just finished and started again - it's SO MUCH better.  I haven't followed the advice exactly but their interest in my story kick-started something much more fun and imaginative.

I also asked my writer pals on twitter what they did to fire their story engines.

Mo O'Hara, the author of the Zombie Goldfish books, is a people watcher:

I people watch and listen to snippets of conversation. There is always a story.The other day I saw a really tough looking teenager in a hoodie with a giannormous cuddly toy. He was prob on a call but he looked like he was arguing with the Panda...story!

GR Dix takes himself off for a trip:

I drive around the countryside / look at a map - daft village names = character names = inspiration!

As does Nina Wadcock:

Visit old places or graveyards and wonder whose stories are beneath my feet.

 Top Tip Five - Lower your Crap-o-meter.

This is possibly the most useful tip I've ever been given and it was from our very own award-winning, best selling, Teri Terry. It's okay to write rubbish sometimes.  You can edit later.

Get it writ, then get it right.

Don't hamstring yourself by trying to be perfect from the start. No book is perfect from the off. It's like expecting to chisel out the statue of David with the first couple of hammer taps. It's not going to happen. Take off the pressure and have some fun with your writing.


Happy writing everyone!

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Kathryn Evans latest book, the pacy, gripping thriller ( Sunday Express)  Beauty Sleep, is out now.

How Getting Writing Wrong is Alright by Kathryn Evans

I've been beating myself up about this blog post.

Doing the Time Warp

By Nick Cross

Time Warp choreography animation by Luca Alberton, DensityDesign Research Lab

We talk a lot about certain aspects of writing a great novel - craft, voice, plot, characterisation etc. But one authorial choice that gets a lot less focus is that of time. The timeframe a novel is set within has a huge impact on the style and structure of the finished work. James Joyce’s Ulysses famously takes place on a single day, zooming in with microscopic precision to the individual thoughts and actions of its characters. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels couldn’t be more different, spanning the thousand year interregnum between the fall of one galactic empire and the rise of the next. Such a massive scope means the storytelling is much more fragmented, with the narrative sometimes leaping fifty years between chapters.

1976 editions of the first 3 Foundation novels with amazing Chris Foss wraparound artwork

Time is an endlessly malleable resource for storytellers. Consider the movie Groundhog Day or the recent children’s book The Never-Ending Birthday by Katie Dale - both present a narrative where the characters must relive the same day again and again. Or what about the novel One Day by David Nicholls, which takes place on the 15th July every year for twenty years?

Each of the Harry Potter novels is structured across a school year, which gives the series a very particular feel. Although there are lots of pulse-pounding set pieces that occur in a short time period, these are set against the wider boredoms of school life. The Harry Potter books are full of regular events: potions lessons, mealtimes, holidays, quidditch matches, detentions, end-of-year exams. JK Rowling’s genius is that she uses this repetitious structure both to show how attending school (even a magical one) can quickly become over-familiar, and to subvert our expectations when something unexpected happens within the predictable cycle.



My wife dislikes books that take place over a highly-compressed time period, because it seems that the characters never get a moment to rest, being pulled from one crisis to the next. When do they eat? Or sleep? It feels for her (like the characters) that she is never able to catch her breath, which can make for an exhausting reading experience. This was a criticism that was regularly levied at the TV show 24, whose lead character seemed to have a constitution (and bladder) of solid iron.

I’ve become acutely aware of time as I work on my current YA novel. As you might remember if you read my earlier blog post Living in the Past, I’m writing a story that parallels past events. My initial plan was to structure the book as a series of publications, each published a couple of months apart. At this point, the timeline of the book was going to span 3 years, which meant I could frame most of the incidents in the plot as a reaction to real-world happenings. The problem with this structure became very clear when I got a critique on the first 12 pages - although I was presenting the book as a first-person commentary, the fragmented nature of the plot meant I was unable to properly explore my protagonist’s rich inner life.

After a bit of head scratching, I switched to a diary format, which meant pretty much starting the book again. And with this narrative change, the timeline of the novel contracted massively. Instead of 3 years, my whole book will now happen in less than 10 months. On the plus side, this has left room for a sequel, on the minus I quickly realised that there were simply not enough real incidents to steer every plot event. Organically, I’ve compensated for this with more fictional characters and plot of my own, but tying these into the real-life political and cultural environment.



As well as compressing the narrative, the use of a diary format has also intensified it. Instead of scenes set months apart, I now have a scene or two per calendar day. The scenes themselves have also got shorter and leaner - which is the way I like it. I hope this all helps to communicate the rollercoaster rhythm of teenage experience, where every day is simultaneously the best and worst of your life.

Altogether, the changes have meant that the book has moved much closer to a highly-illustrated YA novel than the experimental graphic novel format of the prototype. I don’t have a big problem with that - it’s what's right for the book, and a familiar structure gives new readers a pre-existing reference point.

Photo by Sebastien Wiertz

Finally, there’s another aspect of time that strongly affects the writing process, which is how long it takes you to finish the book. Some authors like to produce a whole book over a very short time period, writing furiously. Others can take ten years or more to come up with the finished article. I’m somewhere in the middle, and regularly curse my slow progress. Taking the decision to illustrate as well as write this book has compounded the problem, since I’m now doing the work of writer, illustrator and designer. Additionally, my preference for regularly reviewing the process and resetting the book hasn’t helped me so far get to THE END, although I feel the format is now nearly right. Would I be more productive if I rushed out a full but imperfect draft, then revised it? Perhaps, but my mind seems to be best suited to my current way of working, as frustrating as that sometimes is.

In a recent Guardian Q&A, novelist Siri Hustvedt was asked what her greatest fear was. She replied:

“I’m afraid I will die before I finish whatever book I am working on.”

I totally get that, the feeling of time conspiring against our creative endeavours, and the race to the finish that might be required to outsmart it.

Nick.

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Nick Cross is a children's writer/illustrator and Undiscovered Voices winner. He received a 2015 SCBWI Magazine Merit Award, for his short story The Last Typewriter.
Nick is also the Blog Network Editor for SCBWI Words & Pictures magazine. His Blog Break column appears fortnightly on W&P.

Notes from the Critique Group - The Gap

by Maureen Lynas

This was a very interesting discussion at the SCBWI BI York critique group involving:

THE GAP
The space that's left for the reader when we SHOW rather than TELL

Leaving THE GAP gives the reader a role to play in the story as they infer and interpret the text. There's a balance to be had between showing and telling depending on the genre, age group, and experience of the reader.