"Extra-Curricular" Story Prompts

When you're writing a new story just about every week, you need to find inspiration in the things around your daily life. Something in a book, in the news, an image on film or an advert, a song lyric. Anything can be utilised as we writers pounce on it like the magpies we are. So with the forthcoming publication of my fifth collection of flash fiction stories, I thought I'd give the story behind some of the stories, what actually prompted the idea to pop into my head.

"Night Vision"  I am a huge music fan, always on the trawl for new tunes. I'm on a couple of mailing lists for record stores and get weekly new release updates. I usually try and check out any that sound interesting by going to YouTube. Can't remember the band as the music didn't grab me, but their video was of a man's movements in this incredible blued out visual. I don't know if it was thermal imaging or some other design treatment, but it set me thinking. The video really allowed you to see and think about the movements of the human body in a wholly different way.

"Blood Angel" This came about by a striking image in an "X-Men" movie of the character of Jean Grey with her red hair billowing against flames the same hue, so you almost couldn't tell which was hair and which was fire.

"Zombie" In my last collection "28 Far Cries" I wrote a story deconstructing the werewolf myth. Here I take the same treatment to the myth of the zombie and equate it with plastic surgery disasters. I'm not a big one for myths.

"Flea Circus" I'd always known of the existence of flea circuses, but when the phrase was prompted once again in something I was reading, I went and looked up how they were actually constituted. Then it very quickly became the notion of scale as I had human beings performing feats for an audience of giants. There are some great flea circus videos on YouTube.

"Reading For Two" Just the touching gesture of a husband reading to his dying wife as she lapsed into unconsciousness. I was very moved by such an act when I heard about it.

"Phoneanemic" When you sneeze, you are deafened by your own noise and your eyes reflexively lid themselves for protection. If this happens in the middle of a conversation, you lose what is being said through the sneeze. So I had some fun trying to recover the missing meaning effaced by an explosive sneeze!

"Perspective" There is an author called Ben Marcus who writes the most remarkable fiction that pulls and stretches at just how language functions. He has a book called "The Age Of Wire And String" which is never overtly explained, but seems to be a dictionary/anthropological work of an alien species observing the human race on Earth but not quite 'getting' our language. So I wrote this story about aliens observing and interpreting the human race if their guidebook was formed from all the Earth's canon of art criticism. 

"Performance Anxiety" Just from thinking about how quickly our consumer technology becomes obsolete. Remember 8-Track music cartridges, Betamax videos or Sony Walkmans? I do.

"Drones" Many nouns have several shades of slightly differing meaning. The word drone unfortunately in recent parlance has come to stand for only one thing, the military pilotless aircraft. I explore all the other meanings of the word and try and reinstate them alongside the prevalent meaning. When read out live, I try and make the words sound like a drone. 

"Bye Bye Lingual" Periodically you hear of a language in danger of dying out with its last speaker. This is a story to honour that happenstance.

"Rebirth" This came from watching a true crime programme about a victim who was strangled to within an inch of her life and suffered some brain damage from oxygen starvation. The programme was an uplifting portrait of her battle to recover all her faculties as she battled back to have the last victory over her assailant.

"Bas Relief" This did originate from a visual prompt provide by "VisualVerse" of a human brain. Just looking at it I was struck by the notion it could be viewed as lots of human beings compressed and packed one upon another to form a labyrinth.

"Compound Fracture" I've always been fascinated by certain aspects of German grammar even though I don't speak the language. After all, it is closely related to English through their shared Anglo-Saxon roots. I love the concept that if a word for what you're trying to say doesn't exist, you can sculpt it by joining together other words in German. Since I have found myself in this situation as a writer, I went ahead and wrote a story in which I could indulge this ability in English.

"Disbanded" A music video from one of my favourite bands provided the image of a set of skull drums mounted from the hips. 

"Confirmament" I have never understood how the drawings of star constellations of the Zodiac work. So I started imagining what it would be like to redraw them.

"Wings" from a lyric in the Birthday Party song "Mutiny In Heaven"

"Overpass" For some reason I got really hung up on perpendicularity, things crossing one another that otherwise would have had no relationship. I saw it only as an omen of ill, such as when a cat walks across your shadow. The title was a reversal of the word "Passover" which gave me the last paragraph of the story.

"Crowd Sauced" This came from reading about the folk justice meted out through Rough Music

 and wondering about what a contemporary version might look like. Recycling Nazis was my response, even though I happily and assiduously recycle.

"The Disenchanted Forest" Reading about folk symbols and translating them to their modern day equivalent. Some more Umweltverschmutzung  spilling over from "Compound Fracture". It means world pollution, literally 'environmental dirt'.

"In Triplicate" When secretaries had to type in triplicate using carbon papers, I just wondered what it would be like if the 'in triplicate' part was extended to other aspects of life beyond a typewriter. 

"Echoes" Ultrasound images of foetuses, so recognisable, so striking and achingly beautiful and all constructed from sound waves. I've written about the relationship of sound to language and memory before, but this is a story about the relationship of sound to the visual sense and emotions. 

Available for pre-order on Amazon UK, Amazon US, I-Tunes

Triptychs Cover Reveal

Writers often get asked where they get their ideas from. And if like me you write short stories and flash fiction, you have to come up with a whole host of ideas to feed all your stories. I get most of my ideas just by keeping my eyes open in daily life, especially when commuting and observing my fellow passengers; or from items on the news.

But when I was approached to become part of the Mind's Eye third collection of stories all in response to photos, that was a bit different for me. Because I'd had no prior relationship with the image I was presented with, I had to react to someone else's artistic sensibilities, that being the person who took the photo. (Mind's Eye 1 and Mind's Eye 2)

Even more interestingly, the participating writers were sharing the same images. The collection is called "Triptychs" because each image will have three different stories from three different writers. I haven't seen the stories yet, so I'm really excited to see what the other writers did with the images I was asked to create from.

Before I give the cover reveal for this collection and before I show the two images I was asked to riff off, I just want to give the blurb for the whole project:

Now this notion of three different angles on the same image is exactly what I love doing in my flash. I've always described it as like turning a gemstone to reflect the light in different ways from all its facets. In such a way I believe you can show all the subtleties and nuances of things in a way that is very condensed and compact, unlike in a novel when things like character perspective may limit just how many different angles you can show, or the effect is diluted through the sheer length of the story.

So, now the two images I was asked to create stories from.

 

credit: Martin David Porter                  credit: Helle Gade

Now, one was an absolute breeze, I was struck by an idea instantly (can you guess which one?) But the other, well I was racking my brains for months on end. The setting sun was the instant one, such a beautiful image. The only teaser I'll give you is the title, "Cloud Animals". But the teapot on a barge with some swans swimming by... Man I was struggling with that, as those who know me I tend not to write pastorals! And eventually that was my way into a story, to try and come up with something utterly opposite the tone of stillness and grace conjured up by the image. So I did! Don't think the title is much of a clue for this one, but it's called "Water Fugue In C-Minor". "Cloud Animals" is a flash story at under 1,000 words. "Water Fugue..." is a short story at 2,350 words.



So that only leaves the cover reveal for this inspiring project. I give you - "Triptychs"

You can preorder from AmazonUK AmazonUS