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Heard a guy at a coffee shop in Denver say "the prompt is the story, not the writing"
He was arguing that most prompt lists just hand you a setting and a character and call it a story. I skimmed the same list he was holding and he's kind of right, half of them were just "write about a lighthouse keeper" with nothing to push against. So what's the last prompt you saw that actually forced you to make a choice instead of just describing a scene?
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jana76919h ago
Kept thinking about this after I read it. The prompts that actually work usually have a built in trap, like "write about a lighthouse keeper who has to decide whether to light the lamp tonight" or "describe the same room from the point of view of someone who just got dumped and someone who just got hired." Still simple, but now you have to pick a side, and the picking is where the story lives. A setting alone is just a photo, you need a fork in the road to make it move. Half those list makers know this too, they just leave the fork out because it's harder to write a good one than a pretty one.
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