I used to think writing prompts were a waste of time for real writers

For years, I figured if you were a serious writer, you just sat down and wrote your own ideas. I tried one on a whim about six months ago from a site called 'Promptly' that said 'Your character finds a door in their home that wasn't there yesterday.' I wrote a 500-word piece just to prove it was silly, but it actually unlocked a whole side story for a novel I'd been stuck on. Now I use a prompt every Monday morning to warm up, and it's fixed my writer's block completely. What's a prompt that surprised you by how good it turned out?

3 comments

3 Comments

karenw901mo ago

Oh man, I felt the same way! The one about "you're the last person on earth, but the subscription services keep billing you" got me writing a whole short story I'm weirdly proud of.

ivan_perez1mo ago

That prompt is such a good one, it really gets your brain going. What helped me was just writing the first dumb scene that popped into my head, like the main character arguing with a robocall. Once I had that down, the rest of the story kind of fell into place around it. Finishing a whole thing feels amazing, you should totally keep that momentum going.

caseyw1219d ago

Honestly it's like that with a lot of things, you think it's a dumb shortcut until you actually try it. I was the same way with cooking recipes, swore I'd just wing it forever.