‘Meet Cute’ short story in The Saturday Paper

In workshops with Sarah Sentilles, I have learnt about the power of generative writing to open up my writing. Sarah creates prompts, often from poems, and then the class has 7 minutes to respond. What shows up in these 7-minute bursts is often unexpected - and, thankfully, often just the thing that your work in progress needs.

I was looking through my old notebooks recently and saw that I wrote the final scene of Time and Tide in Sarajevo in one of these 7-minute sessions, during a Word Cave in 2021. Parts were almost word for word as what ended up in the finished book, and I think it is one of my favourite moments.

More recently, I did a series of these prompts with some of my writing friends over Zoom and found myself writing returning each time to the same story, building on it in each 7-minute block. I had a woman eavesdropping on a couple breaking up in a cafe, but I didn’t know what would happen next. I kept doing the prompts and came up with the first draft of Meet Cute, which was later published in The Saturday Paper on 24 August 2024. You can read the story here. A few readers commented that it felt like a bit of a Time and Tide in Sarajevo parallel, more running! What I loved about writing this story was flipping expectations.

Sarah also offers an online course called Prompts & Circumstance where she gives you 3 prompts a week and you have access to a whole library of previous prompts.