This will be my last Writing Prompt from the Cocoon for a while – not because I am fully out of lockdown, but because summer is here and it’s time to concentrate on my own writing.

I leave you with another ekphrastic prompt, from this excellent Facebook page where members recreate famous works of art – in this case Кира Викторовна’s recreation of Salvador Dali’s 1925 work, “Girl at the Window“. You might write in response to either one of the images, or you might decide to place them in dialogue with each other.

Two sources of prompts to keep you going over the summer:

• Every week O Bhéal post a new five word poetry competition
• The Poets and Writers website posts “a poetry prompt on Tuesdays, a fiction prompt on Wednesdays, and a creative nonfiction prompt on Thursdays”

Happy writing – stay well, stay safe, stay creative – Monica

A writing prompt to keep you going for a few weeks: Write a short story. How? There is plenty of advice on the Internet, some excellent, some less so. I chose the following from The Write Practice for one piece of advice that resonated: “Write your story in a single sitting”.

Here’s an abbreviated list of their suggestions:

1. Read short stories…
2. Write your story in a single sitting…  Everyone hates being interrupted when they’re telling a story. Use that to your advantage and don’t stop writing until you’ve finished…
3. Read your draft… without changing anything. This will give you a sense of what work it needs…
4. Write a premise… Get your head around the main idea behind your story by summarising your story in a one sentence premise. Your premise should contain three things: a character, a goal, and a situation.
5. Write, edit, write, and edit. Good writing is rewriting. Use your second draft to fill in the plot holes and cut out the extraneous scenes and characters you discovered when you read the first draft in step #2. Then, polish up your final draft on the next round of edits.
6. Submit!

• Free of preambles—They start at the flashpoint—the moment when conflict ignites tangible action that drives the story forward.
• Scene-based—They frequently take place in one run of time, without jumping around.
• Observant—They tend to feature not the “I” but the “eye.”
• Insightful—Like a flashlight illuminating a dark corner, they explore something that provoked an insight.
• Specific—They stick with concrete, observable events and actions rather than abstract concepts.
• True—As a subgenre of creative nonfiction, Flash Memoir must uphold the nonfiction contract that what is reported actually happened.

• At its most basic, a micro-memoir is written in sentences, drawn from personal experience, and strives to create a world in as few words as possible.
• A true hybrid, the micro-memoir strives to combine the extreme abbreviation of poetry, the narrative tension of fiction, and the truth-telling of creative nonfiction…
• What they’re not: fragments. Micro-memoirs aren’t slivers of a bigger creation. They’re designed to stand alone…
• Forget about the big memories, like meeting your beloved or witnessing a tragedy.
• Consider memories that you retain without understanding why.

• https://brevitymag.com/where-to-publish-flash-nonfiction/
• http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/p/places-to-submit-flash.html

Image from page 80 of “The new art of memory, founded upon the principles taught by M. Gregor von Feinaigle: and applied to chronology, history, geography, languages, systematic tables, poetry, prose, and arithmetic.”

This week’s prompt is a quote from Eavan Boland, who died suddenly on April 27.

“I was aware,” she said, “that it was easier to have a political murder as the subject of an Irish poem than a baby or a washing machine.”

And as a bonus prompt, begin a piece of writing with the first line of The Pomegranate:

The only legend I have ever loved is…

“It was the day the dandelions turned into clocks.” — Sherrie Scott, member of the original Scratching Hens.

You might use this quote as a regular prompt, or you might use it to create an acrostic poem — definition and examples here and here. Here’s a sample start:

it was the day i got lost in

the

woods…

a

s

t

h

e

d

a

y

t

h

e

d

a

n

d

e

l

i

o

n

s

t

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Not a writing prompt this week, rather a signpost to online resources that will help you develop your craft.

If you have time on your hands, the renowned Iowa Writers Workshop offers FREE online courses in poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction.

And if you have time and money to spare, the excellent Arvon Foundation and Faber Academy offer a variety of options.

These range from a two hour Arvon Masterclass in Plot and Narrative Structure, (April 30 at 11 AM, cost £35); to Faber’s flagship eight-month course, Writing a Novel Online (application date August 19, cost £2500).

Happy writing – stay well, stay smart, stay kind.