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Can we talk about how too many prompts give away the ending before the writer even starts?
I run a small writing group out of my garage here in Sacramento every other Thursday, and for the past 6 weeks I've watched people bring in prompts that basically hand you the whole story on a platter. Like one guy handed out "write about a woman who finds out her husband is a spy and has to decide whether to turn him in." There's no room to move. You already know the beats, the twist, and the choice, so everyone's story comes out feeling like the same bowl of soup with different crackers. I started testing this myself on a Google Doc and stripped one of my own prompts down to "a woman finds a receipt in her husband's coat." Seven people wrote seven totally different things, one was a breakup, one was a comedy, one was straight horror. The difference was night and day. A good prompt should be a door, not a hallway with the lights already on. If you can guess the last line before you write the first one, it's not a prompt, it's a fill in the blank. What's the most bare bones prompt you've seen actually work, and what did people do with it?
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sam5303d ago
A good prompt should be a door, not a hallway with the lights already on" is hands down the best way I've heard this put, and I'm stealing it for my next group meeting, no shame. But wow, the husband spy prompt, that's not even a door, that's a hallway where someone already flipped every switch and left you a snack. The real killer is how confident people are when they hand those out too, like they just solved writing for everyone. Most bare bones one I ever got was just "the last bus of the night" and we had a ghost story, a super sad one about a nurse getting off shift, and one guy wrote about a bus driver who hated his route so much he quit mid trip lol. Nobody saw anybody else's story coming, which is kind of the whole point.
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