If you can’t do pubs or just don’t want to you can substitute a cafe or some other outing for this exercise.

Go to a pub and get settled in, now look around and write down a list of 50 words that occur to you from the surroundings – some of these words will be longer than others – find the three longest.

Now you can do several different things with these words, the first is to hurt place each word down the side of a page so that there is one at the top, one at the bottom and one in the middle. Now write from one word to the next incorporating them into the poem.

Secondly you can make a spider diagram or cloud diagram of each word with the word in the middle and words associated with them around the outside. For one word do words that seem related to the middle word, for the second write memories or ideas you associate with the word and the third one write down concepts or story titles that are to do with the word. Now you can do a longer version of the first exercise with these word clusters or you can pick the longest word and make an acrostic poem. If you want to be really fancy you can do a double acrostic where the ends of the lines make a word on both sides of the poem. We used to call these Word Poems at school and they can be fun to make.

If you face something a little more difficult you can take the words and create a kind of cross word poem with the words going down the page as well as across or fit the words into a scrap landscape you can create from old paper.