The above picture I took in The Antique Gallery of Houston, a place I highly recommend visiting if you ever get the chance. You can lose yourself for hours in the hundreds of antiques stalls there, there’s just so much to see and take in.

As I meandered through the stalls I came across a writing box. It was well worn and sadly a little overpriced for me, but its contents were wonderful. I took a picture of them, these snippets of someone’s life as they told a story, I felt like I could almost see the outline of the life these items had once been a part of. I hope to piece my own tale together from this picture as there was something so vivid about the contents of that writing box. What a great writing prompt – perhaps one someone else can make use of.

Sometimes its easy to pull a story out of thin air, but not always. Prompts help, I seek them out whilst all the time. They can be anything – a conversation overheard on the bus, a feather boa found abandoned on the street in the early hours of a Sunday morning, the sound of a pigeon taking flight under a bridge the flap of its wings echoing off damp stone or indeed in amongst the contents of a vintage writing box.