Autumn is generous to writers. The light changes, the routine changes, and suddenly there are wet pavements, early darkness and jumpers to write about. Whether you are drafting a novel, shaping a memoir or trying to write a poem that is not about leaves, a seasonal prompt can get you moving when a blank page will not. Below are thirty prompts for UK writers — ten each for fiction, memoir and poetry — with a few ways to turn a short exercise into something worth keeping.

Getting the most from a prompt

A prompt is a starting point, not homework. The aim is to produce something messy quickly, then decide later whether it has a life. These five habits make the difference between a useful session and twenty minutes of staring out of the window at the rain.

• Set a timer for twenty minutes. Keep writing until it stops, even when you are certain the sentences are poor. Poor sentences can be fixed; empty pages cannot.
• Write by hand if you keep circling the same ideas. Slower writing often means more specific writing.
• Do not stop to research. If you need to know when the clocks go back, write the clocks went back that weekend and carry on.
• Read it aloud the next day. Your ear catches the flat lines faster than your eye does.
• Keep one file called Autumn. Every prompt you attempt goes in, dated. By January you will have more material than you remember writing.

One warning: seasonal writing slips into cliché quickly. Rust, woodsmoke and cinnamon are the default settings. Look out of your own window instead and find the thing only you would notice — the smell of a school corridor, the particular grey of a supermarket car park at four in the afternoon.

Ten fiction prompts

1. A character returns to their home town on the first frosty morning of the year and finds the house they grew up in painted a colour they would never have chosen.
2. A wet October afternoon in a launderette. Two customers, one working machine, and neither of them speaks for the first page.
3. A family sits down to a harvest supper with one chair deliberately left empty. Nobody mentions it.
4. Clearing a parent's loft, someone finds a bundle of letters addressed to a name they do not recognise.
5. A power cut during the first storm of the season traps four neighbours in the same hallway with a torch and a box of candles.
6. The night the clocks go back. A character is handed an extra hour and decides to spend it badly.
7. Bonfire Night in a small village. The effigy on top of the fire is not Guy Fawkes.
8. A pick-your-own farm on its last weekend of the season. The owner is deciding what to do with the land.
9. A pupil starts at a secondary school in a market town and keeps a list of everything that has changed since primary.
10. A delayed train, leaves on the line, and two people who used to be best friends stuck on the same platform.

For each of these, resist the obvious ending. The strongest autumn fiction is usually about a change that has already happened, with the weather as a backdrop rather than a plot device.

Ten memoir and life-writing prompts

1. The smell of a school jumper drying on a radiator.
2. The first autumn you had to buy your own winter coat.
3. A walk taken in the week the clocks changed. Write it in the present tense.
4. The last barbecue of the year, when everyone gave up and ate indoors.
5. A conker match at break time, including the rules you invented and never wrote down.
6. The journey home in the dark. Describe the route without naming a single street.
7. A recipe that appears in your family only in October. Write the method as instructions for someone who has never cooked it.
8. A teacher who kept the radiators on and the windows open all term.
9. The autumn you missed — through work, illness or study — and what you noticed when you finally went outside again.
10. A photograph of a bonfire. Write only what happened in the ten minutes either side of it.

Life writing works best when it trusts small evidence. You do not need to explain what a conker match meant. Describe the crack of the shell, the string cutting into your fingers, the walk back to the classroom, and let the meaning arrive on its own.

Ten poetry prompts

1. A poem about fog written as one long sentence.
2. A list poem: ten things found in a coat pocket in November.
3. A poem addressed to the hour of daylight lost when the clocks go back.
4. A poem in very short lines — one or two words each — that describes a leaf falling.
5. A fourteen-line poem set entirely in a bus shelter.
6. A poem made only of the names of things visible from one window. Add nothing else.
7. A poem in the voice of the last apple on the tree.
8. Begin with a weather forecast and end with a memory. No weather in between.
9. A poem that repeats a single line, changing its meaning each time it appears.
10. A shopping list for a harvest supper, where the final item breaks the pattern.

Poetry prompts are constraints in disguise, and that is the point. When the shape is fixed, the language has to work harder. If a poem refuses to come, try the same prompt in a different form the following week.

Turning a prompt into a finished piece

Set aside one twenty-minute session to answer a prompt, and another the next day to read it back. Choose the one line that surprised you — usually a line you did not plan — and write for twenty minutes from that line. Then decide what you have: a scene, a page of memoir, a poem, or nothing yet.

Keep the three best sentences and put the rest aside without guilt. Most prompts are practice, and practice is not waste. One prompt a week from now until the end of November will give you eight or nine pieces to work on through the winter, when the material is quieter and you have more time indoors.

If you want a place to start today, take prompt seven in the fiction section, set a timer, and write the first paragraph before you decide whether it is any good.

Photo: Nennieinszweidrei / Pixabay