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PSA: I heard a kid at the library say 'the prompt is the story' and now I get why my writing group hated my drafts
So I was at the public library on 5th Street last Tuesday, just killing time while my car got an oil change, and I heard this teenage girl at the next table tell her friend that the prompt is the story. She was working on some school thing, and I am not a creep, I just could not stop listening because it hit me hard. Here is the thing. For 2 years I have been running a small writing group out of my kitchen, 4 people, every other Sunday, and I always treated prompts like a warm up. Like stretching before the real thing. So I would write 300 words about a lighthouse or a lost dog, read it out loud, get a couple nods, and then move on to what I thought was my actual work. But she was right. Every single prompt I ever rushed through came out flat because I was writing toward an answer, not a scene. I looked back at my notebook from March and my best piece was this 2 paragraph thing about a guy returning a rented tiller to a hardware store in a rainstorm. That was a prompt I almost skipped. Real question for you all, do you finish a prompt piece and keep going, or do you treat it as done when the timer hits? And does anyone else feel weird about mining random overheard stuff for ideas, or is that just normal writer behavior?
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barbara_taylor8313d ago
Oh this is me, I do the exact same thing and I never thought about why until now. I have a folder full of prompt stuff I banged out in 20 minutes and then closed the notebook like it was a chore I finished, but the pieces people actually liked at my table were the ones I sat with for another hour after the timer went off. There was this one about a woman finding a grocery list in a coat pocket at a thrift store and I almost threw it out, then I came back to it that night and it turned into 6 pages. Nobody ever tells you the timer is the thing that is wrong, not the prompt. You are right that writing toward an answer kills it, you can feel it going flat while you are doing it. And no, listening in at the library is not weird, that is just where the good stuff is, half my notebook is stuff I overheard at the laundromat.
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