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I thought writing prompts were just for kids until I got stuck on a story.
I was trying to write a short story about a character finding an old key. Could not get past the first page. A friend sent me a prompt from a site called Reedsy. It said 'Your character finds a key that opens a door in their own home they've never seen before.' That one detail, the door in their own home, changed everything. I wrote the whole thing in a weekend. Anyone else have a prompt that just clicked and got you writing?
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sandra6933mo agoMost Upvoted
Oh man, I know that exact feeling. I was totally stuck on a scene where two characters meet in a cafe, and it just felt boring. I found a prompt that said, "They meet in a cafe, but one of them is there to end the world." That wild twist forced me to figure out who these people really were and why they were there. It broke the whole thing open for me. Sometimes you just need that one weird detail to shake things loose.
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king.jordan2mo ago
Totally agree with you and @sandra693 on this. That same kind of prompt got me out of a rut once too. I was trying to write a haunted house story and it felt flat, just the same old creaky floorboards and whispers. Then I found a prompt that said something like "the ghost isn't haunting the house, the house is haunting the ghost." That flipped the whole thing upside down in my head. It made me stop trying to be scary and instead focus on this weird, sad relationship between a building and a spirit, and the story just poured out.
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