Joinaward-winning fantasy and dreampunk author, Anna Tizard, in a journey into the writer’simagination – at once profound, surprising, funny, and extraordinary. Anna usesthe surrealist word game of Exquisite Corpse to generate short story ideas bymixing listener’s word suggestions into weird sentences. The results areimagination-bending, and a real workout for your creative writing.

Listen to brandnew short stories and scenes as Anna drafts them (she uses the “pause” buttonto compose them) and learn from tips, techniques and tools she shares along theway: practical ideas that you can use to write suspenseful fiction, especiallyfantasy.

It’s theultimate writing prompt challenge. Your weekend is not weird enough (orcreative enough) without Brainstoryum!

Subscribe forfree to Anna Tizard’s private email list and receive an e-book to begin yourjourney 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 80 of Brainstoryum.

As I mentioned last time, today I’m going to talk a bit about a series I absolutely love that has monstrous themes at its heart: Ransom Riggs’ Peculiar Children series, which begins with Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. They made that one into a movie; didn’t like it, haven’t watched it since, but my goodness, I don’t know how many times I have read the book – or the whole series, because I just love it. As an author, I have to ask, why? What is it that I love so much? And can I pin-point these story elements, themes or types of things going on, to transform them into something that’s uniquely my own, in my writing? This is a great exercise for any writer for honing in on the real stuff that excites you. The better you know yourself as a reader, and why you enjoy what you enjoy, the more you can tap into the same kind of magic in your writing. And that sort of excitement is infectious: if you’re excited about what you’re writing, this will come across in the style – let alone your fundamental choices about what you write about.

Now, while the Peculiar Children series is mainly built around monsters, the threat of these monsters who have tentacles coming out of their mouths and basically eat your soul (pretty way out there stuff), Riggs casts the philosophical net a bit wider. The peculiar children who have various oddities and strange powers are effectively outcasts from ordinary life, and are wrongly considered a threat to others. They have to live apart from the real world, in time loops. So there’s this lingering question of “What is a monster? Are some people labelled monsters unfairly?” And the protagonist, whose life is painfully banal, or so he feels, gets to experience this incredible acceptance and belonging in the peculiar group when he finally meets them, who become less peculiar to him once there’s acceptance and understanding on both sides. A thought-provoking element of the story; I appreciate a bit of chin-stroking, when it’s cleverly incorporated into the story itself and the protagonist’s emotional experience.

But grey areas aside, the real, undeniable monsters inthe story...