10d ago

Can we talk about how too many prompts give away the ending before the writer even starts?

A good prompt should be a door, not a hallway with the lights already on" is hands down the best way I've heard this put, and I'm stealing it for my next group meeting, no shame. But wow, the husband spy prompt, that's not even a door, that's a hallway where someone already flipped every switch and left you a snack. The real killer is how confident people are when they hand those out too, like they just solved writing for everyone. Most bare bones one I ever got was just "the last bus of the night" and we had a ghost story, a super sad one about a nurse getting off shift, and one guy wrote about a bus driver who hated his route so much he quit mid trip lol. Nobody saw anybody else's story coming, which is kind of the whole point.