My writing group prompt went sideways at the coffee shop

We were doing a ten minute sprint at The Daily Grind, and the prompt was 'a character finds a key that unlocks nothing'. My friend, Carla, got stuck and said it was pointless. I suggested she flip it, so the key was the thing that was locked, and the character had to find the lock. She ran with that and wrote a whole page about a glass key in a museum. Anyone ever have a prompt that just didn't click until you turned it around?

3 comments

3 Comments

thomas.piper19d ago

Turning a prompt around like that is a solid trick. Carla's glass key in a museum is a great example. It went from a dead end to a whole story. @noah_walker16, what kind of prompts usually trip you up? Is it the really vague ones, like "write about the color blue," or the ones that feel too limiting?

noah_walker1619d ago

I always hated those prompts, but flipping it like that actually sounds pretty cool.

morganhayes23h ago

Last year I had a prompt about "a locked door" that just stalled me out. I spent a week trying to describe the door itself and got nowhere. Then I flipped it to write from the perspective of the key that was thrown away years ago, and the whole thing clicked. That shift from object to history is what made it work for me.