Post In The Machine

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It is probably clear to anyone reading this blog that most of the pieces here are the results of prompts. I’ve been writing to prompts a minimum of twice a week for over three years, and, as a result, my writing has progressed by leaps and bounds.

My preference is for prompts set by other people and with a time limit, with my favourite prompters being Jill Badonsky’s The Muse is IN Writing Club and Cynthia Morris’s Free Write Fling. Both operate a little differently. Jill’s prompts are more like writing exercises and are sent out to club members twice a week with a due date. She encourages you to edit your work and post it on the Writing Club private blog. Cynthia holds a Free Write Fling four times a year, and for each of these, you free write to a variety of prompts (phrases, images, etc) for a minimum of fifteen minutes every day for a whole month. She does not encourage you to post your free write and suggests editing after the month is up. However, participants are encouraged to post comments about how the writing felt for that prompt.

Both workshops provide different avenues for my writing development. With Jill, I get to play with different ways of writing - poetry, haiku, various styles of fiction. For example, the previous Sunday's post "Table For One" was an opportunity to write in second-person narrative (something fiction writers don't often do) and to play around with a hardboiled noir style of writing. With Cynthia, I just download whatever is in my head even if it is rubbish. (Believe me, some of it IS rubbish. I should post some of the really awful stuff here some day so you can see how bad it can be.)

However, both are similar in that I get a chance to create characters or tell stories, some of which I probably couldn't get away with otherwise, and others which will become 'real' stories and get published. Hopefully.

Last Sunday's story falls sharply into the 'some of which I probably couldn't get away with otherwise' basket. I've always loved quirky inanimate creatures in other peoples work. There are a few in Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot". There is the sugar bowl in T.H.White's "The Sword In The Stone". And then there is the one that inspired "The Vending Machine" - Nick Park's "A Grand Day Out", which is my favourite Wallace and Gromit tale (although the rest of the world seems to prefer "The Wrong Trousers"). I adore the officious yet lonely moon machine, and have always wished I could create something like it. So when I was given a prompt to write about a vending machine, one little opportunity to fulfil one little dream came true.