Rachel Knightley looks at ways to turn fear of the blank page into inspiration and make a start on writing something new
The instinct for most of us when experiencing fear is to do all we can to make it go away. Sometimes that means reassuring ourselves we have nothing to worry about, other times it means putting energy into crisis-managing against something that might not happen anyway. Yet, as writers, being too quick to get away from fear can mean rejecting our most reliable source of inspiration.
Nobody fears what doesn’t matter to them: every fear we have – from spiders to elevators, global warming to social anxiety – is a ‘what if ’ story we’re already telling ourselves and, like any good story, it’s one in which the stakes are high for the character. When we stop and listen to those stories, we get to recognise them as the original fiction they are. It’s not only a way of recognising the difference between our anxiety and our reality; it’s tapping into our most reliable muse.
The five exercises I’m sharing come from my workshop at the UK Ghost Story Festival earlier this year. However, the ‘ghosts’ in question are an entirely naturalistic kind of haunting: each exercise is about summoning the questions, observations, imagination and memory that make up every writer’s unique wealth of material. They are all about building creative confidence and offering a safe, clear route from fear of the blank page to the curiosity that fills it – turning the things that really do haunt us into equally haunting and unique stories.
1. Early images
Have a look at the list of writing prompts below. Let your eyes be drawn to one and allow it to call up a memory from childhood or your teenage years. Fictionalise any detail you like (name, gender, location, setting, whatever else occurs), but keep the emotional truth.
Treat this exercise like any warm-up: no specific goals – and definitely no editing or judging yourself! Just transcribe what you find in your head and trust that you can edit later.
Write for eight minutes.
Your earliest memory
Your favourite food
Your antagonist
Your mentor
Your song
Your belief
Your toy
Your betrayal
Your piece of clothing
Your injury
Your victory
Your home
Your friend
Your choice
Your compromise
If you’re doing these exercises in a group:
When you have each chosen your own prompt and written for eight minutes, turn to the person on your left. Tell them which prompt you picked (no details of what you wrote about, just which you chose). Now, each of you has a new prompt: the one the person sitting next to you started with.
Write for four minutes this t
