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Warning: I burned 3 weeks on music prompts before realizing setting details beat emotional cues
Two months back I joined a local writing group here in Boise and we did a prompt challenge with two rounds. Round one was all abstract stuff like "write about grief" or "a character feels lost," and I stared at the page for 20 minutes each time, came up with nothing worth keeping. Round two they flipped it and gave us weird specifics, like a character has to return a lawnmower they borrowed in 2009, or write a scene that happens entirely in a dentist's waiting room. I knocked out 4 full drafts in one weekend, which never happens for me. The vague ones let me wander in circles because there was nothing to grab onto, but the concrete prompts forced me to invent details and the story just grew from there. I showed both rounds to my friend Dana and she picked the boring-sounding dentist one as her favorite without me telling her which round it came from. So now I keep a list of small weird situations instead of big feelings. Has anyone else found that a really specific prompt beats a deep emotional one, or is that just how my brain works?
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rileyl675d ago
Man, I gotta disagree on the emotional prompts being useless. When I get something like "write about grief" I don't stare at the page, I just pick one tiny thing from my own life, like my grandpa's old tackle box, and the feeling comes out through that object anyway. The trick is that the feeling has to attach to something you can touch or smell, or it floats away. Sounds like the dentist prompt worked for you because it gave you a container, not because feelings are bad prompts. But hey, if your weird situation list gets words on the page, that's what counts.
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