Join award-winning fantasy and dreampunk author, Anna Tizard, in a journey into the writer’s imagination – at once, profound and hilarious, existential and quite silly. Annauses the surrealist word game of Exquisite Corpse to generate short story ideas by mixing listener’s word suggestions into weird sentences. The results are imagination-bending, and a real workout for your creative writing.
Listen to brand new short stories and scenes as Anna drafts them (she uses the “pause” button to compose them) and learn from tips, techniques and tools she shares along the way: practical ideas that you can use to write suspenseful fiction, especially fantasy.
It’s the ultimate writing prompt challenge. Your weekend is not weird enough (or creative enough) without Brainstoryum!
Subscribe for free to Anna Tizard’s private email list and receive an e-book to begin your journey into The Book of Exquisite Corpse (includes exclusive material notpublished anywhere else). Go to annatizard.com.
INTRO: Hello imaginative people! I’m Anna Tizard and this is episode 77 of Brainstoryum. When I look backover the some of these more recent shows where I’ve been exploring my new theme of weird creatures, I recognise an underlying theme cropping up, as it’s come up in my writing before, just in different form: loss of control. I’ve often thought that the hardest stresses to bear in life are usually the ones that seem to render you helpless. Whether that’s illness, bereavement, or other practical limitations which a life situation presents you with, like not being able to earn enough: these make us feel out of control. And we might wonder then, if we ever had any control, if the feeling of control we usually think we haveis just an illusion. (Please get help, by the way, if you’re suffering from any of these things – don’t suffer alone.) Writing fiction is not therapy per se, although it can help you face your demons a little better. It’s why I wrote TheEmpty Danger, my first book in my series, because in March 2020 I realised was facing the same fears that most people around the world were facing at the same, and while it was terrifying and made me helpless, I also saw an opportunity to explore this potentially unifying force. Could there be something positive in there, somewhere, if I searched hard enough? I hunted with my pen, and The Empty Danger is the result.
But I digress. I think what I’m getting to is the idea that the element of lack of control is something we can explore through suspenseful creature fiction, perhaps fantasy that helps us imagine confronting monsters; and maybe this is why the plot structure is so satisfying, when the protagonist goes from being terrified and threatened by the unknown; gradually piecing together scraps of information about the monster, so that it becomes less unknown by degrees; and then, they have a go at fighting it, and even killing it. We get that vicarious joy and relief at being able to destroy something that has stressed us out.
But as I’ve been reading about writing monsters, I’ve realised that a lot of this kind of stuff is very much applicable to longer stories – novellas, novels – where you have the space in which to take a protagonist through that journey, of coming to understand and in some way, hopefully, overcome a monster. Turn a feeling of lack of control into a sense of having some control. And I’m sure that I will be writing longer pieces that use these plot devices, because I love them – there’s something in there that I just love. But that doesn’t mean I can’t still use the practice ground of short stories, in fact, you can still fit some of these elements in a shorter piece, it's just that they can’t all be realised to their fullest extent. You can show a glimpse of some of these plot elements rather than necessarily have them play out completely, and dabble in different aspects. And I already know from experience...