For the last 30 years I have been a published short story writer and novelist. For the last 20 years I’ve also been a creative writing tutor, which I love.  It’s the perfect complementary job for a writer because we tend to spend a lot of time alone (or at least with a bunch of imaginary people!)

I teach two weekly classes in Dorset and I’m also invited to teach at conferences around England and Wales.  But of course in lockdown this had to end. My courses generally entailed meeting in actual rooms and being less than two metres apart.

Briefly I contemplated using one of the online platforms like Zoom. I already offer online courses, but I knew that some of my students weren’t comfortable with this and I wanted my classes to continue with all of my students present, not just 50 per cent of them.

However, I knew I would miss inspiring other writers. For me, teaching is primarily about inspiring people to write and get published if that is their dream.

So I began a daily writing prompt on Facebook.

My original idea was to give my students a little extra inspiration. Many of them used Facebook.

Each day I post a writing prompt on my Facebook timeline. It might be a theme, for example, revenge.  Or a quirky picture – so far I’ve had a yellow ford Anglia, a lone swan on a lake and a picture of a medieval jouster.  Sometimes my prompt might be just three random words to incorporate into a story. For example, Friday’s three words were, banana, penny, owl.

The word limit is 250. The deadline is the following day.  I read the stories and give a free 5-word critique, also the following day.  It’s hard to critique in 5 words, so my critiques are often longer. It’s the best fun.

I love reading the stories that people post. People often critique each other’s work too, which is brilliant.  And I’ve had some lovely messages saying I am helping people forget about lockdown.  What could be more satisfying than that?