Writing prompts and exercises can be the perfect way to move your writing project forward. Some of our members have shared their favourite writing prompts to spark your creativity.

At UVIC, in 1985, after reading some of my writing, fiction instructor, Leon Rooke, told me to “go crazy." By this he meant: use my imagination,  avoid self-editing, and “just get it down." I took his advice to heart; it was such an affirmation and so liberating. Ever since, I have followed my nose, that is, pursued what interested me in both subject matter and reading.

As a beginning writer, I had a quote by Gertrude Stein taped to my desk.  It was a great motivator:  No one cares if you don’t write.

 

About M.A.C. Farrant:

M.A.C. Farrant is the author of seventeen books: thirteen collections of satirical and philosophical short fiction; one novel, The Strange Truth About Us; a novel-length memoir, My Turquoise Years; a book of humorous essays, The Secret Lives of Litterbugs; and the stage adaptation of My Turquoise Years, which premiered at Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre in 2013. The most recent is One Good Thing.

Currently residing in North Saanich, British Columbia, Farrant has been nominated for many awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, The Van City Book Prize, the National Magazine Awards, the Gemini Award (for the Bravo short-film adaptation of her story “Rob’s Guns & Ammo”), the Victoria Book Prize, and two Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards for her play My Turquoise Years, among others.

Farrant has taught writing at the University of Victoria, the Victoria School of Writing, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and was Writer-in-Residence at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

The Globe and Mail has written that “Farrant’s work is infused with iconoclastic innovation.” The Ottawa Citizen has called Farrant “One of the best humourists in the land.” BC Bookworld has called her “Canada’s most acerbic and intelligent humourist.” She has been described in print on numerous occasions as “the bizarro Alice Munro.”