Linda says

If you find writing easy, great! But don’t panic if you don’t. Even professional novelists and scriptwriters can sometimes find it hard to write to order.

Here are some tricks that I recommend to professional writers. You can find lots more practical help with writing stories and poems (including writing stories in exams) in my book Writing with Imagination, which I wrote especially for school and TAFE students.

You’ll find ways to tackle tasks like writing a story based on a picture or a starter sentence, or getting ideas out of the blue. Remember, even people who think they can’t write stories at all actually write and star in their own movies every night – when they dream!

Tips for firing your imagination

Imagination works like a matchbox being struck by a match. Strike your imagination with

• Story triggers from myth and fairy tale
  
• Genres
  
• The world around you
  • Items in the paper or on TV
  • Contents of phone and street directories
  • Our lives and the lives of others
    
• Themes and sociopolitical issues
  
• Verbal stimuli
  • A verbal topic
  • A starter sentence
  • A picture in words
    
• Visual stimuli
  • photograph
  • painting
  • drawing

Tips for writing generally

• Give yourself permission to think of lots of ideas before you choose one.
  
• Use Vertical and Lateral Thinking, and trigger them by thinking ‘real but ‘unusual’
  
• Get into your character’s skin by imagining how, in the same situation you would think and feel.
  
• If you have never been in exactly the same situation, remember a similar situation in your own life and remember your physical, emotional and psychological responses at the time.