Join award-winning fantasy and dreampunk author, Anna Tizard, in a journey into the writer’s imagination – at once profound, surprising, funny, and extraordinary. Anna usesthe surrealist word game of Exquisite Corpse to generate short story ideas by mixing listener’s word suggestions into weird sentences. The results are imagination-bending, and a real workout for your creative writing.

Listen to brand new short stories and scenes as Anna drafts them (she uses the “pause” button to compose them) and learn from tips, techniques and tools she shares along theway: practical ideas that you can use to write suspenseful fiction, especially fantasy.

It’s the ultimate writing prompt challenge. Your weekend is not weird enough (or creative enough) without Brainstoryum!

Subscribe for free to Anna Tizard’s private email list and receive an e-book to begin your journey into The Book of Exquisite Corpse (includes exclusive material not published anywhere else). Go to annatizard.com.

Hello imaginative people. I’m Anna Tizard and this is episode 82 of Brainstoryum.

In the last show there were so many useful, incredibly practical pieces of advice offered by fellow writers who have more experience than I do in writing fight scenes: from testing out moves physically, considering the feasible skill levels of your characters (or their lack of skill) before diving in, using shorter sentences to create a sense of speed and pace, to ensuring that you hone in on the emotional and psychological experience of your protagonist as the fight unfolds. It’s a lot to think about, I find; a lot to take in. I’m wary of trying to take in too much at once, because these things take time and practice to really absorb, and it’s quite easy, I think, to intimidate ourselves out of a writing exercise by thinking too much about technique.

Now, I want to continue with this deep-dive and learn more about how to write fight scenes, although I think it’s important to keep the balance between spending time thinking critically – consciously and conscientiously – about these things, and following the white rabbit of inspiration. Because there comes a moment when you pick up the pen, or touch your fingers to the keyboard, and to capture the wonder that we experience in reading great stories, as writers, certainly in the first draft, I think it’s worth giving in to the subconscious mind, and letting yourself be led down a pathway whose twists and turns you can’t yet see.

So let’s turn our attention for a little while to technique, then it will be time to begin an unplanned, spontaneous adventure into the imagination, which I think is vital nourishment to our creativity.