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.

INTRO: Hello imaginative people! I’m Anna Tizard and this is episode 84 of Brainstoryum.

I mentioned last time how, lately, circumstances have left me a bit isolated, and I haven’t been able to get out as much as I’d like, and it’s not that long before the four walls start to feel a frustrating. It prompted me to think about a phrase Iused to use more, among friends, to describe a book or short story that is so well written it makes you feel nourished. I’d say it was “word food”, because as an author, maybe it is true to some degree that you are what you read (or have read, and have valued reading). It’s not quite as direct as “you are what you eat” because that’s more physical, to do with literal nutrition affecting how well your cells regenerate and all the millions of bodily processes that go on; but you get the idea. Some stories and poems make us feel nourished; and they’re likely good for our writing, as we naturally absorb the rhythms and sounds and general deliciousness of quality literature. But oneexperience reminded me, unexpectedly of this “word food” idea and how I should probably extend it to “experience food” (if that’s not too ridiculous) because all life is experience, everything that happens to us affects how we feel; some events may even change us, the way we think; what we expect. And if we find ourselves stuck indoors with the “four walls of the apocalypse” as we nicknamed them during the COVID lockdowns, it will help not just our writing but our overall mental health if we find ways to stimulate our imaginations, or just – seek out interesting facts on blogs or in podcasts, if nothing else. What happened – and this is quite a boring problem,low-stress – is I lost...