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My prompt jar broke open in my backpack and I found 3 months of sloppy ideas I never used, so now I'm pitching a new rule
Last Tuesday I was biking home from the library in Boise and my backpack zipper popped. My mason jar of writing prompts smashed on the sidewalk and a bunch of little paper slips went everywhere. I got most of them back but a few were soaked from a puddle. The annoying part is that 90 percent of those prompts were junk I wrote at 1am, like 'write about a sad tree' or 'two brothers argue at a wedding'. I write 5 prompts a week and I have been doing that for 7 months now. So I sat on the curb and read through the wet ones and I got mad at myself. I think most prompt lists are a trap and we should burn the cute ones. A good prompt should put your main character in trouble in the first line, not ask you to 'describe a memory'. What makes a prompt actually work for you, or are you all just writing sad tree stories?
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jamietaylor28d ago
Man, the image of you sitting on the curb in Boise picking wet paper slips out of a puddle is rough. I lost a whole notebook that way once when a water bottle leaked in my bag, and half the pages turned into mush. You're right that "describe a memory" type prompts just let you float around and never land anywhere. Give me a first line where somebody is already in trouble, like a guy hiding a car in his neighbor's garage, and I'm off and running.
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