Rant: my own prompt went rogue and turned my sweet camping story into a cult thriller
So last Tuesday I sat down to crank out a simple prompt for my writing group, something like 'a family camping trip goes wrong.' Easy, right? Except I got carried away and added five extra rules, and one of them was 'nobody is allowed to leave the woods.' My buddy Dave ran with it and came back with 12 pages where the dad was actually the forest itself and the campfire was a sacrifice altar. The whole group spent 40 minutes arguing about whether marshmallows were a metaphor for lost souls instead of talking about pacing. I tried to pull it back with rule six, but by then everyone was writing forest cult lore and someone made a map. Honestly the worst part is Dave's story was way better than my original idea, so now I look like the guy who accidentally invented horror camping. How do you all rein in a prompt when it starts growing extra heads like this?