Loading…
34
My writing buddy told me prompts are 'training wheels' and now I can't stop thinking about it
So my buddy Marcus and I were sitting at this diner in Portland on Sunday and he drops this on me. We both write short stories, and I've been using prompts for like 3 years now. He says prompts are training wheels, that real writers just sit down and write whatever comes. I said that's crazy because half my best ideas came from a prompt I found on some random blog. He goes 'name one story you finished from a prompt' and I actually had to think hard. There's a split here I keep going back and forth on. One side says prompts give you a jumping off point and kill the blank page problem. The other side says you end up writing to the prompt instead of to the story that wants out of you. I've got 14 unfinished prompt stories on my laptop right now, which maybe proves his point. Where do you all land on this? Do prompts actually make you a better writer or just a busier one?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
tyler85421d ago
Did you ever go back and count how many of those 14 have an actual ending you like? I used to swear by prompts too, kept a whole doc full of them, but then I noticed something kind of sad. The stories I finished were the ones where the prompt just got me moving and then I forgot about it about a page in. The ones I never finished were the ones where I kept trying to answer the prompt instead of following the characters. So these days I use them to get started but I drop the prompt the second the story pulls me somewhere else.
2