28 Far cries - story prompts

In my latest collection of flash fiction "28 Far Cries", the stories were largely written over the course of 3 months earlier this year at the rate of one a week. This is a very different way of writing from say a novel, since you have to come up with a whole fresh idea from what you did a week before. But this is not as difficult as it sounds, since every day throws up potential story prompts, sometimes in most surprising ways. They can be just everyday observations, people, songs, books, or more specifically a phrase or word in a book. Sometimes a title can come to you first and then you have to find the story that the title conjures up.

So here are the prompts for each of the 28 stories in the collection.

“Road To Nowhere” - this started with the title after the Talking Heads’ song of the same name stuck in my head and just developed from there.

“The Idea Of A Man” - a coalescing of three images that had always stayed with me, a body from Pompeii, the convoys of Iraqi dead in the desert and a body preserved intact from a Scandinavian bog. 

“Ur, Um” -  I’d read those stories where someone wakes up one morning to find they are fluent in Chinese or Russian all of a sudden and wanted to think about what might happen if the original Ur-language came back from extinction and what it might provoke. I was really pleased when the title came along as it did albeit late in the process, a story about language and literacy captioned with almost complete illiteracy!

“Cop Aesthetic” - I can’t quite remember the full genesis of this, but I have always found vultures fascinating creatures and the notion of finding them meditative was one starting point, followed by the notion of the vulture taking care of corruption in the animal kingdom, with a detective doing the same among humanity.

“Staring At The Sun” - prompted by me developing floaters in one of my eyes.

“The New Editors” - this started life as being about the mutation of words on a computer screen under the effect of a virus, but the editor idea crept in and shifted the thrust of the whole story. I don’t think this about editors by the way!

“Nemesis” - I wanted to write an anti-superhero story while we were being bombarded with them in the movies with one lame new release after another. It turned into a realism tale that interrogated the genre of the superhero.

“Shape, Structure, Time” - after reading the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, I wanted to try and write something along a similar idea. This is a story without characters, but represents a movement in time as traced across a human built structure. Robbe-Grillet is a genius at this. I aimed to make mine uniquely British however.

“Root And Branch” - when parents contemplate their failings, turned up to eleven!

“The Interplanetary Flaneur” - I wrote the bulk of this a long time ago when slogan T-shirts were all the rage. But it only fully coalesced when I hit on the notion of an observer from another world.

“Nocebo” - we all have issues with swallowing pills don’t we? Also reading about the high-ranking Nazis in Hitler’s bunker who took cyanide rather then be captured by the Red Army.

“Geiger Countering” - reading the short stories of Gary Lutz and the way he thrusts words together to make detonations inside the reader’s head, something incendiary just went off in my head and led to this tale.

“Happy Sour” - reading in the bath a book of stories by Brian Evenson and he used the simple phrase “Happy Hour” in a story and my brain went into association overdrive. What if happy hours weren’t actually happy? I had about seven sentences formed in my head by the time I climbed out of the bath and they were the skeleton of the story. Whole thing was completed in an hour.

“Fix Bayonets” - I saw a TV programme where singer Marianne Faithful was exploring her lineage and the programme covered how the Red Army had engaged on a series of mass rapes in Vienna as they went on to do throughout Germany. I knew about Germany, but had no idea about Vienna.

“Lupus” - another one of those hurling reality to do battle with a myth, in this case a real life disease against the myth of the werewolf.

“Percapita” - the videoing of Western hostages being beheaded naturally provokes utter revulsion, but I wanted to get beyond that since revulsion means a turning away from trying to understand the mechanisms at work. I wanted to think about the different cultural issues around the whole thing, including that of film-making, audience and the language of propaganda. About two months after I wrote this, Facebook showed beheading videos under the banner of debate. They soon pulled them under the public outcry.

“Still Ill Man” - I avoid central London as much as possible, but I had to go to Covent Garden where you are beset by jugglers, mime artists and human statues. There was one head to toe in silver paint and in that image was this story born. It was like a human being in a metal carapace and I imagined him imprisoned rather than encased. 

“The Quality Of Writing Is Strained” - I’ve always been interested in the physical act of writing, of forming alphabets and the play on the word “tablet” pulled it all together.

 

“Our Father” - an offshoot of a novella I was writing, so the two came in parallel. A slightly different take and tone in this story than the longer piece.

“Unsighted” - waiting to meet someone in central London who never showed up. I think I hung around uselessly for 90 minutes. Revenge is writing a story about it, though this went through so many drafts, the story ended up being at the expense of the person waiting, not the one who failed to show. 

“Skin Bar” - this was two separate ideas that became conjoined in one story. First was the angularity of a human body dancing against the unyielding metal pole and then there came all the stuff about skin once I realised that the surface of metal too was just another skin surface.

“Type-O Negative” - I’d just done a reading at a literary festival and was waiting around in an arts book shop in case anyone from the show was coming back and I was invaded with the words that mutate into other words in this story. I think something about the adrenaline high from being on stage prompted the space for this process. I had an hour long bus journey home and wrote the whole story during that trip.

“Off Colour” - riffing off expressions and phrases involving colours, such as “feeling blue” or “seeing red” and how unsatisfactory they were really. 

“Lord Of War” - I think I’d been reading about the all-conquering Mongols. It’s quite rare for me to write anything with faintly mythic undertones, but that’s how this story turned out.

“Night Terrors” - one of the few myths that does interest me is that of the incubus/succubus. But I wanted to write a story where the grim reality of human cruelty and persecution was far worse than any nightmarish monster.

“No Laughing Gas Matter” - I think what came first was the notion of drug addicts being immune from a chemical attack and only later did the notion of them saving the world come about.

“Human Viscosity” - I like writing about the physical properties of substances and in this case it was how various liquids moved. Liquids that form part of the human body and I wanted to portray a relationship through how these liquids acted, rather than directly referring to any characters.

“Quickie Divorce” - a parallelism of action and motive in two characters with a shared aim and a mutual contract. Told one word at a time. I like the pacing that enables.

I was given the following questions as a blog post prompt by the lovely blogger Amanda Socci, so I thought I'd better do as I was told (!) and answer them.

Actually they form a really good set of Qs that I haven't really been asked before, so am delighted to have the opportunity to respond


Thanks Amanda!

Her blog is here

(1) Your Twitter feed features a bunch of clever wordplays with hashtags (example: Murdoch on the Orient Express #AuthorBooks). Do you plan to compile those wordplays into a book?

Not a dedicated book, but I have written stories drawing on the 140 character limit, plus a hashtag game did inspire my story "The Caller To The Bingo Caller's House Calls House" which I can be seen reading here on video.

(2) You call yourself a literary Molotov cocktail thrower. That implies there is an element of danger to your writing. Can you explain?

I see it more as representing that element of my work which poses a challenge and radical alternativcs  to the existing literary order. The novel form hasn't really changed since the 18th century and I aim to offer a 21st Century literary form. that doesn't mean I want to overthrow the novel and demand everyone else also conceive of a new or updated novel form, it just represents what interests me. For an introduction to some of these ideas, my essay on Creative Imaginations Blog "Towards A 21st Century Literature"

(3) What is “semtex semiology?” Internet search engines do not recognize that phrase! Did you invent that phrase? If so, why?

No that one is all my own work! It comes from my political novel "Not In My Name" which looks at how extremist politics is being fought in cyberspace which is both a battle for hearts and minds and far more vicious because it is conducted behind a veil of anonymity. The idea of Semtex Semiology, was the paradox of how the most material destructive force of a suicide bomb, was being used to implant ideas, to attract recruits to a political cause. How footage of detonating IEDs (Improvised explosive devices) is being used to wage war on the internet. 

(4) You write at length about your university dissertation. How does that fit into your writing?

I actually manipulated my university course choices so as to avoid doing a dissertation! I was very disillusioned with university and was on the point of dropping out when took up creative writing which kept me there because of the opportunities available. But in my debut novel, the main character of which was an academic's wife, I put in a section on each of the different academic types, which may or not be based on my  own experiences! You can sample that section here.

(5) What is the meaning of the title of your blog, Sulci Collective? How did you come up with that name?

Well, a sulcus is the wrinkled groove you see on the human brain. Sulci is just the plural form, and collective is both a reference to all of them (ie the whole brain) but also the idea that I wanted my creative work to be collaborative and involve other artists with their own artistic visions and approaches. An example of something produced from collaborating with a designer can be found here I've got a couple of posts about collaboration coming up, as soon as the graphic designer sends me her experience of working with me!

(6) How do you invent so many wordplays? Are you afraid that someone will steal those ideas or plagiarize you somehow? Why or why not?

Not at all, There's enough words in the language to go round for everybody! I love the wordplay because ti keeps my brain limber. It can also prompt an association of ideas that can lead to something I can develop into a longer piece of writing. It is just play, playing with words and language, unlocking that side of the brain.

(7) Your book 52FF features 52 distinct flash fiction stories using diverse, exotic, and interesting themes. What inspired you to write about those themes? Real-life experiences? Fantasies? Television shows? The news?

Anything and everything in real life can provide a prompt. In that book I actually list the prompts for all but the 5 experimental language stories at the end of the book. Here's a link to the list. I've talked quite extensively on prompts for flash fiction, but travelling on public transport is very fertile in this area. Anywhere there are people really!

(8) You have been interviewed extensively. Is there anything that the interviewers have not asked you that you would like an opportunity to discuss?

I have to say yours are the best set of questions I've come across which is why I'm delighted to be doing them. I like out of the box questions that maybe only have a tenuous link to writing. Failing that, I'd talk about my non-starter career as a bass guitarist in a band

(9) Why do you like reading difficult, challenging books? What do you learn or gain from those experiences?

Because I'm interested in different approaches to narrative, particularly ones that take great risks with language or form or both. I like books that force me to think in a different way and it definitely feedsback into how I think about and approach my own writing.

(10) Do you write for the Good Men Project? If yes, can you discuss? If no, can you describe how you support that initiative?

I was asked by a good friend (whose publications I've contributed to and will be hosting on this blog later this week) to send them something as an unpublished novel of mine is all about the experience of growing up male across two generations. So I've contributed, but am not really an active participant. Maybe when I clear my work backlog I'll see if they want to do anything more with me.

Writing Prompts

Story prompts are great aren't they? They can help get the creative juices roiling, maybe even leading to the writing of a flash for Friday publication.

Whether they're the wonderful photos offered up by Icy Sedgewick. Or the word prompts freely offered at Three Word Wednesday or by Lily Childs' Prediction Challenge and others I'm not even aware of. For someone like me who loves riffing off words, what could be better than being tossed 3 words and told to weave a tale from that?

But, I love the frisson from spotting something in my everyday life that sets off a whole chain of associations that may just end up in a story. Something that drags you away from the ordinary and demands you to don your writer face, whether it's convenient then and there or not. That live alchemy, from something equally random as word or picture prompts, but personal to me in how it leaps up and grabs me by the throat. These prompts are not sought after, nor provided with writing in mind. They are everyday details and observations, but one day your mind is just in a place that transforms them from out of the ordinary.The alchemy begins the moment they leap into the imagination and start sparking ideas.

I think they probably speak in the same way as a word or picture prompt, to ideas that are already bumping and boring inside your head awaiting being given birth. But it is perhaps taking them from that context in which you experienced them that adds something a little bit extra, than to say something provided precisely to jolt the writing process.

Today I have released a collection of 52 pieces of my flash fiction on kindle. As part of the fridayflash twitter community, I wrote one a week for a year, bookended by some beforehand as I learned the art and a few afterwards as the impetus wouldn't let me go even after I achieved my goal of 52 in 52. This collection is what I hope are the best 52 of the 70 or so I wrote.

In the appendix I provide the writing prompts for all but the very experimental last 5 in the collection, which were less inspired by prompts and more by the form of language and words themselves. Most prompts were quite ordinary, sights witnessed on the London Underground, or in a supermarket. One was a single word in a review of a book. Some were fundamentally embedded in the heart of the final story, others just helped me tap into long-held ideas and probably provided the skeleton to hang them on. A couple of the stories I couldn't even remember what the prompts were.

Here are those prompts. I hope you find their genesis potentially useful for coming across your own in the rich pageant that is everyday life.

Plato's Cave: Kebab houses from both when I was at University and when I moved back to London afterwards

Caritas: After attending a charity fundraising auction, where there was the prize of being a character in a Booker winner's next novel

Death Masking Love: I've always had a thing about the smoothness of the outside of a death mask and the wrinkles reproduced inside

The Caller To The Bingo Caller's House Calls 'House': After a twitter hashtag punning game, I was struck by the violence of the rhymes for bingo numbers

In The Nursery: After talking to a child psychologist about the use of play in diagnostics

Confessional: During the 2010 General Election campaign and Prime Minister Gordon Brown's gaff when he was caught describing a voter he'd talked to on camera as 'a bigoted old woman'

Captivation: I was writing a novel with a different police interrogation scene and wondered what it would be like if the suspect started withdrawing from drugs

Loss Of Function: From the phrase 'falling in love' and reading Tom McCarthy's book "Remainder" that week

Bowing Out: The image of the bulbs around a mirror in actors' dressing rooms. I don't know why that image came to me that particular week

Totentanz: I spotted the word in a review in a publication which I was only reading because it had a short piece of my own

Digging For Australia: After failing to excite my own children's enthusiasms for beach holidays

Café Sensorium: After reading a review of a restaurant in which you eat in pitch dark and are served by the blind

8 Legged Army: The tarantula is my animal totem (along with the vulture, see below). Reading about an Amazonian tribe and their relationship to the animals of the forest

Badges: I used to collect rock band badges and pin them to a split open T-shirt I never wore. I was also a cub scout of fairly limited proficiency

Cosmologist's Hangover: Thinking back to a monster hangover at University after a day of five garden parties, working my way back to my college rooms from the furthest one away, stopping off at each of the others on the way. Why this came to me when it did I don't know, as I haven't drunk alcohol for many years

Morning Assembly: I can't remember exactly, but this may have been one of those where the story proceeded from its title. Child soldiers have always been an interest since the days of the Khmer Rouge

2 Up, 1 Down: I attended Tom McCarthy interviewing an architect for his semi-fictional Necronautical Society and it, made me consider the everyday home in ways I'd never thought about before

End of The line: Come on gentle reader, admit you scrutinise what your fellow commuters are reading on the train! Something that kindle readers will prevent us from doing in the future, as there is no readily visible cover art

Deadheading: Another commuter train inspired one. A man sat near me reading a book, with two angry looking scabs on his hairless pate

Pigeon English: I can't remember the inspiration for this, but the pidgin/pigeon homophone led to the grounded bird's eye point of view

Trespass: The anxiety abounding about identity theft and credit card fraud, brought together with the internet's affording of crafting yourself a different online personality from your real life one

Cinderella's Crystal Tips: Seeing a woman's metal ring that covered two fingers between the upper and lower knuckles. It looked like a knuckleduster...

Prometheus Northbound: Looking up at map of the Northern Line during yet another interminable journey along it and the fact that during my peripatetic youth I'd temporarily lodged at about half of the places on the map

5 Items Or Less: Queuing up in my local supermarket to pay, the whole thing came to me all of a piece as I spotted a woman with 3 stars tattooed on her foot

Crazy Gulf: Having played a round with my kids, I began to think back to the props for the holes. Why do all such courses have a clown hole?

The Names: Just something about lists constituting a narrative story in themselves

Basic Geometry: Attending a poetry recital, the word 'fuselage' really resonated in my head. Once it rattled against notions of geometry, I had the juxtaposition that lead to the Twin Towers. I wrote this almost whole on the train journey home

Fairground Attraction: Knife throwing as a metaphor for hurling insults meant to wound but not mortally. At some point I hit upon twinning it with the fire swallower and that made it into a married couple

Cysters: A way of exploring our anxieties about death and abandonment, once I'd read about the calcification of an unborn fetus inside the womb

If It Were Thee: I gutted a previous short story written in the second person that had ground to a halt. Not quite sure how I hit upon the cyborg thing, but once I did then it became all about linguistic programming

The Ties That Bind: "Mr and Mrs Smith" really wasn't a terribly good movie was it? I'd always had the idea of a serial killer who invites hit men to kill him as his series. The husband and wife thing helped me realise it here

Bad Apple: We have an apple tree in our garden. Though fecund, we only get to eat about five apples a year for many of the reasons outlined in the story. We are also plagued by urban foxes and had a rat living off the fallen fruit. Uggh!

Hard Time: I can't remember the impetus for this, but I do write about being imprisoned, or held against your will quite often

Lost Sole: I stepped off a bus and saw a lone woman's shoe on the grass verge. It jolts you out of your familiar associations when an everyday object is seen out of its regular context

De-Terence: Not sure how this became wrapped around a bouncer and I know that came before the stripping away of his youthful illusions, but I can only trace the latter to my own experiences

Bittersweet: I liked the image of injecting poison into the soft centre of a chocolate. An object associated with love, used to kill it off

Knell Quaternion: This started from the story of the Indian temple girl dancer-cum-prostitute and then rolled out into being four tales involving bells

Atlas' Daughter Inherits His Round Shoulders: Just wondered what it might be like to be called in to confirm the identity of your dead loved one

The White Elephant's Graveyard: Reading on Wikipedia about the desert resting place of decommissioned military aircraft

Statutory Statuary: Saying goodbye to visiting friends and wondering when exactly to shut the door on them and getting back to a piece of writing that was calling me. Irony was of course, I ended up writing this instead

Lunar Tic: Just something about your body clock being superimposed upon by authority. My chance to spin on the werewolf story

One Billion Virtuosos And Sos: Just considering how any literate person with access to the internet is now a writer

The Forsaken: The view from the raised platform of my local station. Given a considerable literary makeover, it's not that grim!

Dead Ringer: There would have been some news story about a celebrity lookalike that would have really annoyed me. But for the life on me, I can't remember which one. There are so many after all...

Rich Pickings: The vulture is my other animal familiar. I once stared deep into the eyes of one in a zoo and couldn't begin to describe it. Since then I'd always wanted to write a story about vultures and the increasing ubiquity of child soldiers gave me the hook to hang it on

Drying Out: Another story that may have stemmed from its title, that twin meaning of an alcoholic drying out from their addiction and the drying out of the skin as we age

Assassination City: Youth knife murders are reported every month in London