I was delighted to join five other writers at Retreats for You in Devon, where Amanda Saint delivered input to support the development of flash fiction pieces for inclusion in a Retreat West Books anthology to be published November 2019. Each morning we met after breakfast to write three new pieces of flash fiction based on a different theme.
On Tuesday we were inspired by picture prompts to develop characters and settings around the theme of peace and there was a further activity using sentence starters to complete our work. On the following day, Amanda encouraged us to write new fiction on the theme of love using prompts including music, selected words and what if scenarios. Our final day focused on the theme of power where further images and sentence starters activated ideas. My task is now to develop nine pieces of new flash fiction for submission to Retreat West Books in April 2019. A couple of the stories arrived almost fully formed but others will need considerable work to bring them up to publication standard. It was great working alongside other writers to achieve the shared goal of ideas generation and drafted pieces to be developed over the next few months.
We were very well looked after by Debbie Flint and her team at Retreats for You. If you fancy a few days dedicated to writing, you won’t find anywhere better than this. With a warm welcome, comfortable accommodation and meals with wine, what’s not to like?
the writer is a lonely hunter 