Your weekend is not exciting enough without Brainstoryum! Join award-winning fantasy and dreampunk author, Anna Tizard, in a journey into short story writing using the surrealist word game of Exquisite Corpse. Listeners’ words are drawn from the legendary Socks of Destiny and mixed into writing prompts which lead to the most unexpected story ideas – and a fascinating exploration of writing craft.
In this slightly longer show, Anna delves into storytelling techniques to hook your reader from the very first line, plus how to get un-stuck when you’re writing a new story. Grab a blanket – grab a pen! – and switch your imagination
on with these stories and ideas for the ultimate writing prompt challenge.

Subscribe for free to Anna Tizard’s private email list and get vol 1 in The Book of Exquisite Corpse plus exclusive material not published anywhere else! All at www.annatizard.com.

INTRO: Hello imaginative people! I’m Anna Tizard and this is episode 69 of Brainstoryum. I cannot believe it’s December already, and this is the last show before the Christmas show (whatever that will be. I haven’t really thought about that.) Well, today’s show is a real mix of writing experiences. Once again, words pulled at random from the socks of destiny will generate writing prompts like you’ve never heard before (like I’ve never heard before). And while, as usual, it’s the third and last round which leads to the longer, more complete story that I read out on the show (using the pause button to draft it, of course), this time, the third story turns out to be the most difficult – and the most revealing. I’ve been thinking about sharing more on process and writing techniques in this show; not quite going back to the earlier format where I talked at length at the beginning, but sort of sneaking in observations and helpful tips in between the story brainstorms, and in a way, it’s very handy that this time, on story no. 3, I got stuck for a while. Because it’s the tricky stories, the ones that make you work the hardest, in a way, that can reveal the most about technique, and process. There is nothing quite like getting stumped by a story, to reveal process, and make you stop and think, and consider what works. When a story just flows intuitively, without much difficulty, that demonstrates that you’ve learned and absorbed techniques so well they’ve become subconscious. But then that makes it much harder to describe what you’ve just done. But getting stuck – as I do today, for a little while: that pushed me to experiment and to share different methods that I was trying, and which I know from experience work for me – so I hope that will be interesting and maybe even useful for your own writing.

So on with the show.