“Every story begins with a single word.”
There’s not really a huge amount to say about this book, a “prompt journal to help you write a story”. It’s a lovely little idea, there’s a large select of prompts, what you then do with it is entirely on you!
The prompts are split into ten genres, with the usual e.g. romance, fantasy, horror, and also some slightly less obvious ones like ‘life experience’. Each page is then a brief prompt, e.g. “Write a story about a magician in the court of an Egyptian Pharaoh”, space to write your story, and then some ‘word associations’ which are 15 themed words to try to get into your narrative e.g. tyrant, crown, labour, survive. (sample of the layout shown in the picture). And that’s really it, for almost 200 prompts.
As the intro says, the point of the book is to help you overcome a bit of writer’s block. You don’t have to work through the book in order – dip into whichever genre takes your fancy (they are indicated in the book by a differing icon in the corner). I really loved the last comment, “Use this journal as a playground.”
Personally, I rather like both the format and the prompts. I was going to list a couple of favourites, but to be honest they’re all rather good – brief enough to allow for maximum creativity, but each with just that spark that makes it really interesting. “A bored employee gets control of the social media accounts of a billion-dollar company”, “Deja vu – or is it?”, “A day in the life of the Voodoo Queen”. Something is just a bit more considered than e.g. finding random prompts online, I’d say. And the constrained space – plus those optional extra words to use – make each seem very doable, too.
Overall I think this is a lovely little book for sparking a bit of creativity. I just hope I don’t owe Chartwell or NetGalley any royalties when one of the prompts gets turned into my best selling novel 😉 lol!
NetGalley eARC: 204 pages / 10 ‘genres’
First published: 13th April 2021
Series: none
Read from 10th-13th March 2021
My rating: 8/10
LittleFrogScribbles 