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A workshop leader in Asheville told me my prompts read like to-do lists, and it changed how I write them
I do a small writing group that meets at a coffee shop in Asheville every other Saturday, and about two months ago the woman who runs it pulled me aside after a session. She said my prompts were too literal, like grocery lists where I already knew the answer I wanted. At first I was kind of annoyed (I mean, who likes getting singled out?), but she showed me two of mine side by side and she was right. One said "write about a guy who regrets a choice" and the other class of prompts left room for the writer to surprise themselves. So I started adding something strange or sensory to each one, a smell, a wrong detail that doesn't fit, a rule that boxes you in. Last Saturday I brought one about a person who keeps finding the same object in different rooms, and three people wrote completely different stories from it. Now I spend way more time on the setup than the actual ask. Does anyone here have a trick for building in that kind of wiggle room without the prompt turning too vague to use?
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jordan6536d ago
There was a piece in Poets & Writers a while back about constraints doing this work for you. The trick they talked about was adding one rule that can't be broken, like the object has to stay hidden until the last line. That kind of thing gives people a wall to push against instead of a blank page.
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