Notes

Creative Writing prompts-
Introduction:
Whether your interest is crime or memoir, romance or science fiction, here are hundreds of ideas, story starters and one-liners to help you dive into the creative world of writing. Open to any page and get started on these fun, entertaining and though-provoking exercises, which will help improve your writing skills, overcome writer's block or inspire that novel you've always been meaning to pen.
Explore your memories, experiences, feelings, observations, and imagination to create plotlines, characters, settings, dialogue, moods, and more - from the realistic to the fantastical. Dip into different genres and try out crime, reportage, romance, adventure, humor, nature and historical writing. You may find that a character you invent starts to take on a life and story of their own, or a scene can be linked to other circumstances to build a plot line, or a memory is a springboard to an autobiography or family genealogical history. Whatever style you prefer, these writing prompts will stimulate your creativity and spark your storytelling.

Writing Tips:
1) Address the five whys: who, what, when, where and why.
2) Consider the reader - why should they care about your protagonist or story?
3) If you aren't feeling the response you want the reader to feel, it's not working. Humorous accounts should make you laugh. Thrillers should evoke fear or trepidation.
4) Revisit your work. Embellish, edit, rework it from a different point of view or transport a character from one story into another setting or time period.
5) Develop your characters with details about their physicality and personality as well as their backstory. Think about where they would live ans shop, what they would buy or the kind
of car they would drive.
6) Use all five senses, noy just the visual, to bring characters and setting to life.
7) sharpen your observational skills, taking note of people and situations around you, and weave them into your story writing.
8) Practise writing with short pieces - a six-word story, a 280-character Twitterature, a 50- or 500-word flash function.

Write the beginning of a story using these first lines:
1~ As the sun set over he harbour, the lights of the city came on, one by one. _________________.
2~ You could say that we were destined to meet.___________________________.
3~ I don't usually like parties, but I'd just moved into the area and didn't know many people.__________________________.
4~ Mother hated bad manners, especially in adults._______________________.
5~ I never wanted to be President._________________.
6~ It was the knock-out punch that did it._________________________.