My whole writing project fell apart because of a bad prompt

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?

2 comments

2 Comments

morganj8124d 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.

oliver_ross824d ago

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