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I hit 100 prompts in my notebook last Tuesday and it kind of freaked me out
I started keeping a small notebook of writing prompts back in January, mostly stuff I hear while cleaning houses (weird, I know, but people say the strangest things when you're scrubbing a tub). Last Tuesday I flipped to a fresh page and realized I'd filled 100 of them, which sounds like a lot but it's really about one every three days. The weird part is flipping back through, maybe 12 of them are any good, and the ones I thought were gold at the time are mostly garbage now. My favorite one came from a client in Tulsa who told me her late husband used to leave notes inside the flour jar, just one line each time, and I still don't know what to do with that one. So my question is, for people who keep prompt lists, do you ever go back and actually write the old ones or do they just sit there forever? And how do you tell a keeper from a dud before you waste an hour on it?
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felix985d ago
The thing about the flour jar is it's already a story, that's the problem. A buddy of mine kept a list like yours and sat on one for two years, some line his grandma said about the neighbors' dog knowing when someone was going to die. Every time he tried to write it, it came out flat. Then he stopped trying to build a plot around it and just wrote the scene of her saying it at the kitchen table, and that was the whole thing, like 400 words. So the keeper isn't the idea, it's whether you can see one clear moment in it. Flip through and ask which ones you can still picture a person doing something. The ones you can't picture, toss them, they were never really prompts, just lines you liked. Twelve good ones out of 100 is a solid haul, that's not a problem.
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