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My prompt about a lighthouse keeper turned into 6 pages of backstory and zero actual story
I was at my kitchen table in Denver last month trying to write a 500 word flash piece from a prompt about a lonely lighthouse keeper, and by midnight I had 6 pages of notes about his childhood dog and his favorite soup. I never wrote a single line of the actual story because I kept "world building" instead of just putting words on the page. I ended up tossing all of it, setting a timer for 20 minutes, and forcing myself to write the scene with no planning at all. Does anyone else have a trick to stop the backstory spiral before it eats the whole prompt?
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taylor_barnes596h ago
Tbh throwing out the notes and setting a timer might be the thing that's actually causing the problem. Those 6 pages about his dog and his soup are not wasted, that's your brain telling you who this guy is, and the real story usually lives in that stuff. I'd keep the notes and just grab one weird detail from them, like the soup, then write the scene where he eats it alone on a Tuesday. The backstory is not the enemy here, it's the fuel, you just gotta stop treating it like homework and start pulling one thread into the actual scene.
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