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Lost a full week to a prompt that was 2 lines long because I kept "improving" it
Last month I sat down to write a simple prompt about a lighthouse keeper for my Friday writing group here in Boise, and I figured it would take me maybe 20 minutes. It took me 6 days, and I only wrote 2 sentences the whole time. First I tried it as a straight character study, then I flipped it to second person, then I made it a list of rules, then I cut the list to 5 items, then I decided the keeper needed a name and a dead brother and a boat that never comes back. Somewhere around day 4 I had 11 versions in a Google Doc and none of them were better than version 2. A woman in my group finally read them and said "you already had it, you just stopped trusting the first one," which honestly annoyed me more than it should have. The real trap was thinking a short prompt needs less work than a long one, when it's honestly the opposite. So my hot take is that if a prompt takes you more than 2 sittings, you've stopped writing a prompt and started writing a novel outline. How many drafts do you all burn through before you just post the thing?
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henry85524d ago
The part about the short prompt needing more work than a long one is what gets me, because I think that's backwards from how most people treat it. With a long prompt you have room to be messy, you can wander and still land somewhere. With two lines every word has to carry weight and there's nowhere to hide, so you keep swapping words trying to make each one do more. That's why version 2 was the best one, it came out before you started assigning jobs to every sentence. I've started giving myself a hard rule where I do three drafts max and then I post it even if I hate it, because the fourth draft is never fixing the prompt, it's just me avoiding the fact that I'm done. The dead brother and the boat didn't make it better, they made it safer to keep fiddling with instead of calling it finished.
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