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Hot take: writing prompts that just say "a character finds a door" are useless
I used to throw those vague prompts into my writing group all the time. Like "a character discovers a secret." Stuff that gives you zero to work with. Then last month, someone posted a prompt that said "write about a librarian who finds a recipe book hidden in the 3rd floor bathroom ceiling." I wrote 2,000 words in one sitting off that. That specific detail changed everything for me. Why do so many prompts stay so broad when the good ones are always super narrow?
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kai_stone997d ago
Oh man, this is so true. I remember back in college, my creative writing professor gave us a prompt that was just "a character finds a key." I sat there for an hour staring at a blank page. But then another time someone in the group said "write about a kid who finds a key in an empty birdhouse that opens a lockbox in the attic." That little bit of context (the birdhouse, the attic, the lockbox) just unlocked something in my brain. I ended up writing this whole thing about a family mystery involving a grandfather who never talked about the war. Those tiny details are like a trail of breadcrumbs, you know? Without them, you're just standing in the woods with no idea where to look.
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