Writing Prompt Story Starter: Wall Of Books


wall of books

What will you make of this week’s Writing Prompt Story Starter? This wall of books?

Hotel décor can be the blandest décor in the world. It seems to be designed to be completely inoffensive, to fade into the background and not intrude on your stay. It’s not, by the looks of it, generally designed to make any particular impression.

And then there’s a new kind of hotel that turns that theory on its head. Striking furniture, colours, fabrics and lighting certainly make an impact. Personally I think it’s more sensible, to make a hotel memorable. But then, I guess if you don’t like it you won’t go back. So I see the dilemma.

Anyway, I stayed at this second kind of hotel a couple of weeks ago, and gosh, but it provided a lot of story starter images!

Here’s the first one, but be prepared for lots more over the next few Fridays.

So, it’s a wall made of books, random titles, lots of text books. And one about writing! The wall has then been used as the canvas for a portrait. And not just any portrait but Arthur Conan Doyle – apt because the hotel is in the Edinburgh area, Conan Doyle’s birthplace.

Isn’t it amazingly effective?

I like it

I liked it for a number of reasons.

One is its cleverness, as in the purpose it serves. What was a pretty big open area has been neatly divided into two more intimate, and quite different from each other, zones.

Another is the creativity of the design itself. I admire whoever thought it up.

What a great way to repurpose books. They had one use, now they have another. No one likes to see books being destroyed, even if they’re deadly dull!

And that matter of repurposing, of change of use, is, I think, where my story would start. It’s metaphor for how life can be sometimes. How about you?

 

Does this inspire you? Find more prompts for your imagination on Shirley’s page

Shirley Blair

Fiction Ed Shirley’s been with the “Friend” since 2007 and calls it her dream job because she gets to read fiction all day every day. Hobbies? Well, that would be reading! She also enjoys writing fiction when she has time, long walks, travel, and watching Scandi thrillers on TV.