My whole writing project fell apart because of a bad prompt | Creative Writing Prompts

Oscar Lane · 2026-03-20T19:05:04.987638+00:00

I was working on a short story for a contest in Seattle last month, and the prompt was 'a character finds a key that unlocks nothing'. I spent three days building a plot around it, but the idea just went nowhere and felt empty. Has anyone else had a prompt that sounded cool but totally killed your momentum?

tylerlane5mo ago

Did you try working with the emptiness itself, like making the key's uselessness the whole point of the story? A locked door that opens to nothing could work if the character's reaction to that letdown is what drives the plot forward. What kind of ending were you aiming for before you scrapped it?

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morganj817mo ago

Yeah, that prompt is a trap because it's trying too hard to be deep. It sets you up to write something vague and pointless, which is exactly what you fought. I've seen contest prompts that are basically just a fancy way of saying "write about disappointment." Next time, I'd take the literal object and force it to open something completely unexpected, like a character's own stubbornness.

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oliver_ross87mo ago

Seattle's contest prompt actually helped me, unlike morganj81, I built a whole world from that key.

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