….from yesterday’s post about an ideal writing space, The Literary Mom asked the question… “What do you need to write?”

Well, we’ve already talked about noise vs silence, so you know my views on that 😉 But what about the material side of things?

I discovered very early on, when I started my first Writers Notebook that, although I love words, and can be inspired by them, I’m also a very visual person. I love art, spent a couple of years doing collages (you’ll have to look at my Flickr page to see the kind of stuff I did) and enjoy being surrounded by colours.

Soooo, what do I need to write? Different coloured pens lol. I’m not fussy with my notebooks (although I do love a Moleskine!) but what I really hate is to have a whole notebook full of writing in the same pen, in the same colour. I like to flick back through my jottings and practice work and not only be gratified by the words, but be excited by the whole visual experience of it. My notebooks are a mixture of my writing, quotes, lists, cuttings, pieces of writing I have been in awe of and hints/tips. I get just as much joy out of compiling my notebooks as I do re-reading them and weeding out the great stuff.

I’ve just started a new notebook:

This little baby is affectionately known as No11 😉 It contains enough visual stimulation without me adding to it with a rainbow of coloured pens lol, but hey, it puts a smile on my face every morning 🙂

Is there anything specific that you NEED to write? A certain pen? A particular type of paper?

I spent most of yesterday evening going through an old stash of magazines, tearing out Horoscopes. Our homework for The Write Place this week is to come up with a 700 word story inspired by a horoscope….should be fun 😉

Today’s prompt about the empty street was a weird one lol. I managed to turn it into the start of a story about a woman leaving for work, only to be arrested at the bottom of her road by a large group of policemen dressed in riot gear….don’t ask me where that’s going 😉 Todays prompt is “the woman in the window” after Roger Aplon so I see a bit of research on the horizon 🙂

HUGE THANK YOU to those of you who went and voted for my story that’s up on the Flash Fiction World website. It is much appreciated 🙂