Blew $85 on a prompt deck at a Portland bookshop and it fixed my worst writing habit
I grabbed a $85 deck of 100 writing prompts from a little shop on Hawthorne in Portland last month after two years of staring at blank pages and quitting by paragraph three. The prompts are weird and specific, like write a scene where a plumber finds a love letter in a drain, and having a random constraint handed to me killed my perfectionism instantly. Does anyone else here think buying prompts is cheating, or is a constraint you did not pick yourself actually the whole point?
Picking the constraint yourself is the trap honestly. When I choose my own prompt I just pick something safe that I already know how to write, and then I'm bored by page two. A friend gave me a random story cube set and the rule was you couldn't swap the dice even if you hated them. Wrote a whole 8 page story about a dentist stuck in a lighthouse because of it, and it was the first thing I finished in a year. Random beats chosen every time for me.