Margie Orford, tutor on Faber Academy’s upcoming Writing Memoir course, shares advice on how to turn up for your story, along with a writing prompt to help you get started.

So much about what makes writing happen is about turning up for your story, which means turning up for yourself.

To do that you need to turn up at the page – that quiet, contained, white page that is there, waiting without expectation but with a welcoming anticipation at the pleasure of your company. There can be such a feeling of urgency and pressure about what you will say, what you will write, that one can freeze when you get there.

But the page – those morning or evening pages are where you are free to think and to feel with your pen without expectation or self-censorship – is a place of freedom and of liberation. It is also only a beginning. Maybe today’s page will turn out to be the beginning, but that is something you will discover at some other point in time. For now it is only you and the room you are in and this page. So here is a way to begin – it is the way I begin and that is all I have to offer you, my fellow writer.

That said, it helps to have a prompt to get oneself going. To get oneself writing freely. To do that free writing – something many of you will know – simply pick up your pen. Try this even if you usually type. There is much to be said about the tactile connection between hand, heart and mind that enables a freer and more embodied writing, a writing that you can feel happening.

It can be hard to start, I know! For some writers it is hard to begin because of how much of the unsaid, the unwritten, is jostling for attention, for a turn. For others it is the silence – that page-blankness – into which all words vanish. So let’s start with a prompt:

Writing Prompt: Standing at the Garden Gate

Write that down – standing at the garden gate – on the page you have before you. That gate is your beginning – your hand, holding your pen, is resting on that gate perhaps. Feeling the roughness of wood, or cool metal. Perhaps it is seared by the heat absorbed at the end of a heatwave day . . . Whatever it is, write it freely.

The technique of free writing is simple.

Mute your phone and then put on your timer for twenty minutes and put it where you cannot see it. Then close your eyes and take three deep breaths, and with an awareness of your body here and now in the quiet space around you, pick up your pen and start writing without crossing out, without thinking of grammar or spelling or punctuation, or where you are going. Keep writing without lifting your pen from the page until your timer goes off. Then stop, flex your fingers, and read through what you have written. Read with kind and generous eyes, looking for your phrases you like or that surprise you. Underline those phrases – maybe five, maybe seven, maybe a full sonnet of fourteen. And then write those down on a clean page, as a poem. A found poem that is there because you turned up at the page.

Take lines you like as tomorrow’s prompt, if you like – but otherwise there is sure to be places in this piece, in this found poem, where you will find glimpses of the story that you are wanting to tell.