As part of the amazing post on idea generation over at Merrilee's blog, there was an exercise involving three picture prompts. Picture prompts have never really seemed to work for me in the past, but this time around, with Merrilee's helpful pointers, I was amazed at how well I got on.


First up was this picture of two people doing... something. This was the picture I had the most trouble with - I found if very difficult to think around the picture. Having actual people in it made me focus in too much, and I struggled to think beyond "what are they talking about?" and found it a but frustrating. Still, I managed a few ideas - here are my top three.
Husband and wife, she's quite posh and snobby while he's much more working class. They're arguing about something, but he's making it worse by making cruel remarks about her voice/clothes/attitude, as he always does when they fight. His ring is a secret signal that he's high up in an underground group. She knows this and is arguing with him about something the group have done but he's very dismissive, and signals to the followers around him that he wants her taken away. He's telling a story about someone who was involved in some kind of fraud and then lost his job a few weeks ago - she realises that he's talking about her husband, who has as far as she knows been going to work as usual.

This was my favourite of the three images. It was both general enough to give me lots to work with and relatable enough to give me some very specific things to catch hold of.  These were my favourites of the ideas I came up with:
There's a small village on the coast which is inhabited by a kind of merpeople - they can live on the land but they need access to the sea on a regular basis. But there's another kind of merpeople, who only live in the sea and are therefore scornful of those who make their lives on the land. When the people of the village go down to the sea, they're often teased and bullied by those who live there - it's an ongoing rivalry on the brink of war. A few years ago two little boys drowned playing in the water. Since then the village has been bowed under the weight of this tragedy. One woman, who was only twelve when the boys died, wants to move on with her life and head out into the world, but her family and the rest of the village are shocked at her callousness and are determined to make her stay. There's a family of eight living in a tiny house on the coast which is falling down and full of damp. The mother has to stay at home to look after the children, the father's a fisherman who simply doesn't make enough money but is too proud to consider doing something else. When the eldest son gets a job after school, his mother is able to actually give the children decent meals - but the father is so disgusted that he stops speaking to the boy, putting the whole family under further terrible strain.

My first thought when I saw this was "time vortex"! My husband's was "Gallifreyan symbol". So how none of my actual ideas related to Doctor Who, I really don't know, but somehow they didn't. I liked this picture - it was a bit of a challenge and I found that several of my ideas were quite closely related, but there was a lot of scope here.
There's a kind of wild magic that's particularly complex and incredibly dangerous to those who choose to wield it - very few are actually capable of controlling it, and those who fail are completely swallowed up by it. However, those who can do so are able to rule completely - nobody can challenge them because of the enormous power at their disposal. But when the power dries up, people begin to rebel, and what was a harsh but liveable dictatorship becomes life-threatening chaos. There's a string of murders happening, and at each crime scene a piece of art is left behind. They all bear the hallmarks of a famous artist and each of the victims is connected to that artist in some way - but the artist was the first victim. A team of sorcerors have woven together a complex spell, designed to consume their enemies and wreak havoc. By its very nature, however, the spell needs to be fed with life, and if it is not satisfied quickly, it takes one of the sorcerors involved in its casting. With each sorceror it consumes, it becomes more and more difficult to control. In light of Merrilee's suggestion that we do this every day, I've been using this site, 365 Pictures, for the last couple of days, spending ten minutes in the morning just using one picture to generate ideas. But I'd expected there to be more of this kind of thing, and I'm already finding this a little frustrating - there are some pictures that just don't work so well for me, so having alternative places to look seems like a good idea. There are lots of writing prompts out there, but I've struggled to find daily picture prompts anywhere else. Because this way of working is already proving so helpful for me, I've decided to take matters into my own hands and have set up this site. I'll be aiming to get a picture up there each day, with related prompt questions for those who find those particularly helpful.

So. Yes. Once again, rather a long time between posts... what can I say? Life is hectic.

I haven't been writing very consistently of late - I'm noticing that my periods of blog-silence generally correlate rather neatly with the times when I'm not getting any writing done. Which makes sense, I suppose, since if I'm not writing, I have nothing writing-related to post about. And if I'm not making the time to write, I'd rather I wasn't making the time to write about not writing, if you see what I mean.

Anyway, despite the very small progress I've been making on the writing front, I have learned one or two things recently.

It really is easier if you write every day.
I know it's said all the time, but I'm seriously growing to recognise the truth of this. If I skip a few days, a week, a fortnight, then when I finally get round to actually sitting at the keyboard I've lost all sense of who my characters are and where they're supposed to be going. I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if I were writing short stories, but it isn't just the story itself that I lose track of - it's the actual writing. Words fit together much more easily if you're making it happen regularly.

If I plot, I have to plot every scene.
With the first novel I finished, it was pantsing all the way for me, until about 20K from the end when I hit a solid stone wall and found I had to figure out what was going to happen before carrying on. With this one, I actually plotted out the bare bones before I started. As I've gone along, I've found myself planning additional scenes - and having to plan them before I write them. Not intensively by any means, but if I don't have a sentence or two describing what needs to happen then I can't seem to write the scene. They've crept up on me, and developed from the story as I went along, but once they pop up they have to be plotted. I'm finding this rather baffling, since I've always considered myself a pantser or discovery writer. But when I realised a few days ago that there were two days in my story timeline that needed to be filled, I was incapable of writing another word until I'd figured out what had to be accomplished in that time and how I was going to do that. (I ended up with five extra scenes plotted.)

I need to be more flexible about my writing time.
One of the reasons I've been writing so little lately is that I'm travelling all the time. I like routine - I like being at home and being able to get up in the morning and shut myself in my little room that nobody else uses just to write. But when I'm staying with other people, I don't have my own little room. (I have somewhere to sleep, obviously, but since my husband sleeps later than I do as a rule it's not an ideal place to write in the morning. I need to try and make the time later in the day - perhaps in the evening - to creep away to a quiet corner of the house I'm staying at and write. Otherwise I keep coming back to that first problem and not writing for days.

In other news, I was delighted to learn recently that Will Write For Wine is returning to regular podcasting from October 9th. This is a fantastic show - thoroughly entertaining and always useful. There'll be a new podcast each month, and you can help influence what Lucy March and CJ Barry (AKA Lani Diane Rich and Samantha Graves) talk about by posting in the forums. I can't wait!

I'm still waiting on feedback for my short story, and in the meantime I'm getting on with typing up my edits on my NaNo 08 novel - which still hasn't got a title. I'm not even close to one. But anyway, it means there isn't really much to tell you, so instead I'm going to talk about writing resources.

As I'm still working out my process (and I hear that's something that can go on indefinitely) I like to try out new things from time to time, and here are a few of the sites, programs and other resources that I've found particularly useful.