I know, I know, we’re all busy right. Busy this, busy that. Well, I think it’s time to STOP for a moment and take a look around. I just spent five minutes lying on the picnic blanket looking up at the autumn leaves and the blue of the sky above. (Then someone started yelling and a diaper needed changing and the phone rang etc)… In five minutes, I think you can give your imagination a little time to refresh and breathe. See if you can make five minutes today to lie back and dream, then, even better, give yourself five minutes more to make some notes and do some writing based on your tiny time out.

When I was twenty, I travelled with three friends through Indonesia. One morning, we woke on the beachfront and climbed aboard a boat attempting to get to the Gili Isles. This image reminds me of that journey, bringing back the faces of my friends and the feeling of freedom that morning gave me. Use this image to write about freedom and travel – either as a personal essay or as a short story. Think about who might be about to climb aboard, or who has recently left this boat ashore and why…

I’ve been tidying my office in preparation for my treadmill desk, which arrives on Thursday. More on that later! So, I’m listening to Joni Mitchell for the first time in ages. And there’s this lovely line:

Sunlight pouring in like butterscotch…

It made me think that for today’s prompt I want you to take something very ordinary and try to find a new way to describe it. Describe sunlight. Describe the feeling of waking. Describe the way your morning goes but use original language. It’s harder than it seems. Cliches pop into our heads (pop, pop, pop) and our job as writers is to let them explode and then to dig in the rubble to find our own shiny new descriptions hidden beneath… or something like that!

Once you’ve done the exercise above, use the Joni Mitchell line to begin a poem. Now, back to tidying my office…