Prompts

This page contains creative writing prompts and short top-tip-tutorials for making your own smartphone/tablet films.

Here’s a very simple one to get you going:

Use your initials to devise a three-word slogan that sums up what you do, what you feel like now, what matters most to you.

My initials are KVL, which is tricky, but for example as a performance poet I could say I:

Know Vowels Linger

I bet, like Dean below, you can do a heap better than me.

Here’s a blog post tutorial about how to make a single-shot filmpoem using kinetic typography. You can make this using your laptop, tablet or phone.

In this blog post tutorial, you will find a step-by-step guide to watching a memory as if it were a film, and writing atmospherically from it. You’ll also find a long list of simple questions that we put inside paper fortune-tellers to prompt both autobiographical stories and flights of fancy!

Taking inspiration from another poet is always allowed, so long as you acknowledge any quoted lines and don’t outright copy. We loved a poem by Jacqueline Saphra, and used it to spark self-portraits as lists of objects. Or how about following the example of American poet Hannah V Norman in Rattle Magazine  who was prompted by this article about commodity prices to investigate what was valuable in her life.

Sometimes the best way into writing is through drawing. Have a go at packing out a memory map with details of a place and time, you can use it as rich material for many poems and short stories.