Ideas for stories come from so many different places – snatches of conversation, a song on the radio, the contents of someone’s Tesco shopping basket. Weave your own ideas with ours and see what happens…write one story about each image, or combine them to see what you get. What’s the first word you think of when you look at each picture? How do they connect?    

Submissions Deadline: 29th March 2019 CivicLeicester is inviting and accepting poems and short fiction for possible publication in an anthology on the theme, Bollocks to Brexit. Brexit has polarised the country and led to the normalisation of xenophobia, Islamophobia and hate crimes. Can the harm it is causing be stopped? Can it be reversed? Who should clean up the mess which the politicians have made and are making? What will the future be like for Britain?...

How have you been getting on with our story starter ideas – do go back over previous posts and check out the images – select your own combination to fire your imagination. Perhaps write 500 words from one of these characters point of view, or a 500 word description of the place you can see here. Use these images to hone your skills, and don’t forget, use the five senses to ensure you are showing...

The Red Line Book Festival now invites submissions from writers, poets, publishers and cultural organisations to submit ideas for events to be taken under consideration for the 2019 festival which will run from the 7th – 13th October 2019.  The objective is to provide a platform for emerging and established writers/poets to reach new audiences, and audiences that may be new to the Red Line Book Festival. The deadline for receipt of submissions is 12 noon on 29th March 2019. The...

Saturday 23rd March at 8pm Tullow Church, Brighton Road, Foxrock Beckett in Foxrock 2019 – All that Fall is organised by Tullow Parish and Mouth on Fire Theatre Company in association with Foxrock Area Community and Enterprise (FACE) with the support of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council and Dublin UNESCO City of Literature. How many villages have a play written about them by a Nobel Laureate? That rare distinction applies to Foxrock Village. All that Fall,...

An aspiring author from East Renfrewshire has been announced as the recipient of Scottish Book Trust’s Next Chapter Award 2019. Samina Chaudhry was born in Manchester, and completed her Masters degree in Pakistan. Seeing first-hand the social and political strife – and one day being held at gun point along with her husband – Samina made the decision to leave. They originally did not plan to stay in Scotland for long, but the warmth and...

You can never have too many ideas – keep a notebook with you ALL the time to jot them down in – you think you’ll remember them but you won’t! Tear out articles from magazines and newspapers, keep a scrapbook, keep your inspiration close to hand. But if you’re stuck or want something totally fresh, see what you can do with our story starter ideas…    

More ideas to get you scribbling – if you’re reached an impasse with your own story, try writing 1000 words using these images as inspiration, it will get the cogs turning again and might show you where you’re gone astray…    

The Wordspark blog is all about giving you inspiration whether it’s for flash fiction, poetry, a short story or something longer – check out our previous Story Starter posts if you missed them. There’s nothing more daunting than the blank page, so here are some images to get your imagination firing – if you’d like to add what you come up with to the comments, we’ll publish what we can, or just use these for...

New year, new you, new story! Here, we hope, is some inspiration for you….