Sleepless in Seattle (writing prompts!)

And some inspiration from author John Boyne.

I'm currently reading The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne (which is wonderful and heartbreaking and funny and agonizing and great) and was listening to John Boyne on a podcast. I thought this insight into his research process was interesting:

“I’ve written a lot of books that were set in the past. And I don’t start with non-fiction. What I start with is, I read novels that were written at that time and in that place. I wrote a novel that was set in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution. So I would read Russian novels from the time. Mostly to capture the idiom of the time. Things like: does a man stand up when a woman walks into a room, how do they travel, what do they wear, what do they eat, what times do they eat. And I find if you just read novels from the time, you will find that information in a much more authentic way than you would necessarily from non-fiction. When I start writing, though, I don’t like to spend a lot of time in advance doing research. I prefer to just get a story down on the page because I find that I don’t know what I don’t know until I get to the end of that draft. And once I have that, then perhaps I can go to the place I’m writing about, do more research. But I like to have the base story down on the page that I can work from.”

Now onto today's prompts, which were inspired by the movie Sleepless in Seattle.