Sole Lundy Fastnet, by Catriona

If you were teaching a writing workshop, what’s a great writing prompt for writers to get started on a piece of writing?

Or is there a method you find helpful when you’re sitting at your desk and can’t think what to write about?

There's going to be some sporting reference in this post, so why not start now: it's very much a question of two halves.

If I was teaching a writing workshop and wanted a way to offer prompts to the other writers in the room, I'd wheel out what3words (link) - the little bit of free software (website or app) that can plot any 3-metre-square place on earth with . . . guess how many words? Except of course I wouldn't suggest to a room full of students that they start downloading apps - so distracting. Instead, I'd recommend coming at it the way I did: on a property website. So there would be a roomful of students, looking at pictures of pretty houses in the English countryside on RightMove (link). Yeah, on second thoughts, I'd give them five minutes to find the what3words website and stick a pin in a map to get a prompt. 

clip apples leap - W3W's landing page

prep mock pops - the White House

quadruple shins handlebar - Crazy Horse Mountain

Ooooh - I just got struck by a plot idea. A student in a writing workshop uses their own address to write a W3W piece and . . . well, you're all mystery-fiction fans. Stalker's paradise, right?

But moving on to the second half of the question: I've got nothing. I've never sat at my desk with no idea what to write about. I'm either writing about whatever happens next in the story I need to hand in by some scary-close day or I'm writing the start of the perfect story in my head that won't run into any problems as I carry it effortlessly and triumphantly to the page.

So I was kind of stuck, on Monday, when I had checked the week's question and was out doing my early morning gardening hour, listening to the radio as usual. Lucky then that, as I mulched some chard and kale, the BBC Radio 4 programme that happened to be on was Poetry, Please and this week it was about the 100th anniversary of the Shipping Forecast (link).

Bear with me. 

Yes, this half-hour poetry show was dedicated to the daily broadcast of gale warnings, general synopsis, area forecasts, and weather reports from coastal stations and inland waters which has been going out, first on long-wave and now on 92.5FM, twice a day, including - this is crucial - at 00.48, just before the national anthem and the switch to the World Service as R4 goes to bed . . . for one hundred years.

There were ten poems - well, nine poems and a Blur track - all inspired by the shipping forecast, and I'm sure Roger McGough had to make some tough decisions to get it down to just ten, because the shipping forecast is . . . well, it's . . . okay, it's a kind of national prayer / meditation / lullaby that Brits hold tenderly in our hearts. I didn't have to look up "gale warnings ... inland waters", for instance. I can hear the soft voice of the last R4 announcer of the day saying all of it. And I still have feelings about the Spanish government changing the name of the Finisterre lighthouse to Fitzroy. 

It's already poetry: irresistible, beautiful, mysterious:

                    "Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties . . ."

And it's ended up a kind of collective writing prompt for a nation. Former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy's sonnet "Prayer", to take just one example, opens:

                        Some days although we cannot pray

                        A prayer utters itself.

                        A woman lifts her head

                        From the sieve of her hands

and ends on the word "Finisterre" Finisterre, Spain. Not Fitzroy. Just sayin'.

I always buy Neil a t-shirt for Christmas and I never thought I'd do better than 2020's Four Seasons Total Landscaping, but last year I knocked it out of the park, with this excerpt of sea conditions from a coastal station:

And then there was the time that two bits of British culture met head-on and one had to give. (Like when QEII was crowned the same day Sir Edmund Hillary got to the summit of the highest mountain in the world and the headline writers were flummoxed. Until the Daily Express came up with ALL THIS AND EVEREST TOO.)

Well, it happened again in 2011 when England was just about to beat Australia at cricket, in what's known as "the ashes", after a match in 1862 that England has never got over losing. There were two minutes left, but it was 00.47 Greenwich meantime and so either R4 Test Match Special, the five-day-long live broadcast of the cricket (yes really) or R4 The Shipping Forecast was going to have to give. 

There was an argument that very few ships actually rely solely on the shipping forecast rather than the technology onboard and it was unlikely that lives would be lost. Click here to hear what happened. (Hint: the shipping forecast is relevant for ships on one day and never again. There are sixty-five episodes available on BBC Sounds. (And I highly recommend it.))

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