thomas_johnson35•10d agoProlific Poster

Vent: That writing prompt about "write from an object's perspective" actually made my story way better

I was so skeptical when I saw that prompt on here last week. Thought it was just some cheesy exercise that wouldn't help with real fiction. But I tried it with a worn out pair of boots my character wears. After 20 minutes I had 3 pages of backstory about the city streets they walked, the mud they stood in, and the guy who repairs them every winter. Totally unlocked a side character I was stuck on. Has anyone else had a prompt they ignored for months then it saved their draft?

3 comments

3 Comments

ericjackson10d ago

Last year I spent three hours writing from the perspective of a parking meter. It was for a scene about a guy who runs out of change at the worst possible moment. I ended up with this whole backstory about the meter being installed in 1987 and watching this same neighborhood change from nice to sketchy and back again. My beta reader said that one paragraph about the meter made the whole chapter feel real. I swear these prompts are like weird little keys that unlock doors you didn't even know were there.

reeseanderson10d ago

Man @ericjackson is SO right about that. It's wild how pretending to be a random object can crack open a whole story you didn't even know was hiding in your head.

wrenh7910d ago

My old writing group used to call that "going deep on junk" and @reeseanderson would always say the best scenes come from the thing you almost deleted. Try writing a whole page from the parking meter's view next time just to see what happens. The guy running out of change becomes way more desperate when you know the meter is thinking "I remember when this block had a laundromat and a bakery." That neighborhood backstory ends up doing more work than a whole page of describing the street.