Karen's blog: Retreat West newsletters

With the latest newsletters including details of the event tomorrow night, competitions and more:

7PM UK TIME - THURSDAY 20TH MAY

Our latest community event with award-winning author, K.M. Elkes, will show you how to grab the reader from your very first line.

One of the fundamental skills of writing, from micro-fiction to novels, is how to seduce your reader from the start by immersing them in your story world. This is at its most acute in flash fiction, where concision is key. This event explores some of the key elements of instant immersion through great texts, take home writing exercises and discussion.

K.M. Elkes is the award-winning author of the flash fiction collection All That Is Between Us (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019) which was shortlisted for a 2020 Saboteur Award. His flash has won or been placed at the Bath Flash Fiction Award, Reflex Fiction Prize, Fish Publishing Prize and the Bridport Prize. He has been published in 50 anthologies and literary magazines, including the Best Microfiction Anthology 2019. His short stories have been successful in major competitions, including the BBC National Short Story Award, Royal Society of Literature Award and Manchester Fiction Prize.

Come join us in our friendly, supportive and inspiring community to attend this event. Even if you can't make it live you can catch up with the recording anytime. Memberships start at just £25 for the year and we've got tons of great stuff going on!

Catch up on previous events:

How to Make it onto Shortlists with Peter Jordan
Writing Your Way into Fabulous Flash Fiction with Kathy Fish
So What's Your Book About? with Amanda Saint and CM Taylor

And get signed up for the exciting ones coming over the rest of the year! Plus we have weekly writing sessions on Zoom, live Zoom feedback sessions twice a month, and lots of members are sharing work and helping each other develop their skills in the dedicated Feedback Section of the site. Come join the fun!

See all our membership packages and sign up here

Voting open until 23.59 UK time on Monday 24th May!

We've got 10 stunning METAMORPHOSIS stories on the Monthly Micro Comp shortlist. Such a fab prompt and a brilliant selection of approaches to it. Well done to the writers of our shortlisted stories. Who will get your vote?

Best of luck to all who went through to the final round and congratulations again to all our longlisted writers - we enjoyed them all.

Read the stories and vote for your favourite here

WIN A PLACE ON OUR YEAR-LONG, FULLY MENTORED, ONLINE NOVEL CREATOR COURSE BY PITCHING US THE NOVEL YOU’LL WRITE DURING THE COURSE.

The course will teach you all the tools novelists use to create compelling, emotionally resonant novels that readers connect to, whatever genre you’re writing. A student from the 2019 class, John Lutz, has just signed a deal for the novel he wrote with us and you can see what he has to say about the course here.

All you have to do to win the place on the course is write an elevator pitch of up to 25 words that gets us excited about your novel. Get advice on writing elevator pitches here.

Enter your elevator pitch here

Copyright © 2021 Retreat West, All rights reserved.

Our mailing address is:

Retreat West

Apartment 3735 Chynoweth House

Trevissome Park

Truro, Cornwall TR4 8UN

United Kingdom

Voting open until 23.59 UK time on Monday 24th May!

We've got 10 stunning METAMORPHOSIS stories on the Monthly Micro Comp longlist. Such a fab prompt and a brilliant selection of approaches to it. Who will get your vote?

Best of luck to all who went through to the final round and congratulations again to all our longlisted writers - we enjoyed them all.

Read the stories and vote for your favourite here

WIN A PLACE ON OUR YEAR-LONG, FULLY MENTORED, ONLINE NOVEL CREATOR COURSE BY PITCHING US THE NOVEL YOU’LL WRITE DURING THE COURSE.

All you have to do to win the place on the course is write an elevator pitch of up to 25 words that gets us excited about your novel. Get advice on writing elevator pitches here.

FIRST PRIZE

A place on the Novel Creator Course starting in September 2021. This includes 24/7 access to the online course materials; 1-1 mentoring sessions; live Zoom Q&A sessions; dedicated course forum; and membership to our friendly, motivational and supportive online community.

SECOND PRIZE

The work alone Start Your Novel Course – launching in June 2021 this is a condensed version of the first 4 modules of the Novel Creator Course designed to help you start a new novel, or revise an early draft.

THIRD PRIZE

A 30-minute call or Zoom chat with course tutor and award-winning publisher, Amanda Saint, who’ll give you feedback on your pitch and novel idea.

ENTRY FEE

£10 competition entry only

£25 with feedback on your novel pitch (if you win one of the prizes you can send a flash fiction up to 350 words for feedback instead)

DEADLINE

23.59 (UK time) 30th May 2021

Enter your elevator pitch here

Copyright © 2021 Retreat West, All rights reserved.

Our mailing address is:

Retreat West

Apartment 3735 Chynoweth House

Trevissome Park

Truro, Cornwall TR4 8UN

United Kingdom

Hi again it's Gaynor here, with another of my monthly newsletters, and this time I'm looking at ideas & inspiration

Always remember, writing advice should be taken with a pinch of salt, what works for one person will be impossible for another, but I hope you find something here to inspire you! If there are particular topics you would like me to write about in the future, then give me a shout on gaynor@retreatwest.co.uk

I love to attend literary events but I've noticed there's one question from the audience that always seem to elicit a groan from the panel, namely 'Where do you get your ideas from?'

I've never been sure why there's such a negative response to this question, perhaps it's because it's so common, or perhaps it's because writers like to hold their cards close to their chest. Perhaps they're worried about people using their methods. Perhaps they don't want to shatter any illusions. Who know?

In my own writing, I regularly manufacture stories out of thin air, because if I waited for inspiration to strike before I ever wrote anything, I'd likely be waiting a long time!

So in that spirit, I'm going to share a few of the things I do when I'm stuck for an idea, and if anything here takes your fancy, you have my permission to use it in a story of your own!

First up, an oldie, but a goodie. The random word generator!

I might keep spinning until a single word catches my eye and try and mind map ideas from there, but choosing more than one word can add even more ideas.
For example, I just got the following combo:
Gun
Suburb
Evolution
And I'm immediately transported to a future, dystopian world where the good guys are fighting the baddies and life forms are segregated depending on how they've evolved.

You can still use this tool if you've been given a prompt word for a contest, such as our monthly micros: keep the prompt word in mind, and then head off to the random generator to try and come up with something unique.

Another favourite random inspiration tool is this one which lets you be the first person to see an archived museum object online: https://thesciencemuseum.github.io/never-been-seen/index.html

My last 3 clicks gave me part of a rocket, a furnace and a radio valve. I like to think about how these objects ended up there, where they initially came from, who used them, what were they used for ... also I think a story about the first person to see anything could be interesting in its own right.

And finally there's always google maps / google earth / google street view for glimpses of different lives, different settings, different images that might be the start of a story. In fact, one of our twitter followers, author Sally Doherty has just been in the news with a google maps related story!

(If you're not familiar with google street view, you type in a destination on google maps, then click on the icon on the page that looks like a little yellow person, then click back on the map image to see photos of the area)

Staying with the random theme, here's an idea-forming prompt that has been suggested to me a few times by different writers.

Choose any book from your shelf, open it up and look for a line that jumps out at you. From Falling Man by Don DeLillo I chose, 'There was religion then there was God.' This is going to be the opening line of my new story. I'm now going to flip to a different page and choose another line, this time I've gone with 'There is no purpose, this is the purpose.' I now have the opening and closing lines of a completely new story that didn't exist minutes ago. It's up to me to fill it in and see what I end up with. I might out a word limit on my story, say 500 words to get from the first line to the last as this helps sharpen my focus.

A side note - I personally wouldn't keep the original opening and closing lines in a final draft as it would feel too much like plagiarism!

A different book this time, Your Friend Forever by Zena Barrie, gives me 'Mr Young had no sympathy for me whatsoever.' as my opener, and 'My solicitor will be in touch.' as my closing line. You can see how different genres of book can send you off in quite different directions.

Like a lot of my writing friends, I am a frequent browser of the internet, purely for research purposes of course. Because my stories tend towards the strange, I do like to just google 'weird events' or 'unexplained' from time to time and see if anything catches my eye.

But one of my favourite weird prompts came from a trip to Chester Zoo where I read on a sign something odd about nuns having helped save an endangered species of salamander. I snapped a photo on my phone then googled the story when I got home, which you can read here. And speaking of nuns, while researching cases of mass hysteria for a new project recently I also found about the meowing nuns, which you can read about here.

I wouldn't then go and specifically write a story about meowing nuns, but I might run with the idea of a select group of people behaving in a strange way and start listing some questions - what would the strange behaviour be? How would I explain it? Would I explain it (for me, no in a flash fiction, yes in a longer piece!)? How would it impact those around them? How would people treat them?

Other stories that have caught my eye are lone plane crash survivors, isolated staircases in the middle of forests, and children who claim to have past lives (and the people who want to study them!).

I use these ideas only for inspiration, and am careful to fictionalise and make stories my own. For example, I might write a story about being the only survivor of an event, not necessarily being a young gilrl who is the only survivor of a plane crash who lived in the jungle and so on ... I'm not an expert on the laws around using real places, people or events in stories so be sure to double check before you submit anything based on a real-life case.

Prior to the internet, we had an encyclopedia of the weird and strange, plus a number of art books by John Lennon and the Monty Python team at my home in 80s Merseyside - I was simultaneously disturbed and enthralled by them and I'm sure they've contributed to my imagination all these years later! You might have similar books to browse through at home, or you might be able to get to an art gallery or museum once things begin to re-open.

Finally, I want to say something in a bit more detail about using prompt words to inspire a story. A common occurrence when reading competition entries based on a prompt, is that so many stories have gone for the same idea. A while back, I was a guest editor for Ellipsis Zine and was inundated with stories about food. I quickly realised that a competition with the theme of food had just sent out their rejections, and it seemed like everybody had sent them on to Ellipsis! There were plenty of well written, interesting stories but they were just too similar to justify being picked. However, I did choose these two stories, Tolerance by Monica Dickson because it made me laugh, although it is pretty dark, and Spare Rib by Rebecca Williams because I loved how it related food to the demise of the relationship. I don't know whether they had written these stories in response to the other competition, but they certainly stood out to me.

So, as an example, I gave myself the prompt word 'velvet' and made a spider diagram of my initial ideas, which you can see in my terribly scruffy hand-writing below.

My first thought went straight to the material - the way it feels, a dressmaker, the fact that it's a material you don't see much these days. But if this was my first thought ... then perhaps it was everyone else's first thought too. There's a hotel in Manchester City Centre called Velvet but I thought that was too niche and would take me too far away from the prompt so didn't pursue it further. I then started thinking of velvet in popular culture - the song and the film, plus the book The Velveteen Rabbit, which I think is about a toy rabbit trying to stay alive? I love the song, and I believe you can use titles in stories though not lyrics due to copyright issues. I also love the film, perhaps my characters have been on a date to see it. I also considered that Velvet could be a name - what type of person would have the name Velvet? Would they have adopted it for themselves, or would it have been their birth name? Was I going to write a sensual story to emulate the feel of the material, or was I going to contrast the idea of velvet with something harsher and harder?

The balance of finding an original idea that still stays close enough to the prompt word to be relevant is, as you can see, a tricky one. But I'd strongly advise doing something like the spider diagram above to play around with ideas before settling and rushing to send in the first idea you come up with.

I would really love to know any suggestions you have for coming up with ideas and inspiration - you can email me or you can tag us on twitter with any idea you would be happy to share. Also, if the ideas aren't coming, try not to fret - it happens to us all. I went 7 weeks without doing any writing at all last year but when I was ready for them, the ideas came back.

That's all for this month,

Happy writing,

Until next time,

Gaynor

Retreat West

Apartment 3735 Chynoweth House

Trevissome Park

Truro, Cornwall TR4 8UN

United Kingdom

WIN A PLACE ON OUR YEAR-LONG, FULLY MENTORED, ONLINE NOVEL CREATOR COURSE BY PITCHING US THE NOVEL YOU’LL WRITE DURING THE COURSE.

All you have to do to win the place on the course is write an elevator pitch of up to 25 words that gets us excited about your novel. Get advice on writing elevator pitches here.