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Can we talk about how a laundromat napkin fixed my worst prompt habit?
I was stuck on the same fantasy prompt for 3 weeks, rewriting the opening line over and over at my kitchen table. Then I found a crumpled napkin in my jacket from a laundromat on 9th Street with a random sentence scribbled on it, and I realized I need a throwaway line to get started. Does anyone else use junk lines just to break the ice with a blank page?
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dakotal161mo ago
A buddy of mine does the exact same thing and it drives his wife nuts. He keeps a whole notebook of total garbage lines like "the chair was red" or "she walked in and sat down" just to get his fingers moving on the keyboard. Says the trick is that the line is not supposed to be good, it just has to exist so the next one has something to sit on. He threw out his first 200 words every single time for a whole year and finished two novels that way. Weird part is some of those junk starters actually turned into real openings once he came back to them a week later with fresh eyes. So yeah, your napkin is basically his notebook, just way more random.
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