Why does everyone keep calling empty prompts a challenge?

I read a blog post from a writing teacher in Portland who runs a workshop every Tuesday, and she shared a stat that made me stop and think. She surveyed 200 of her students over 6 months, and 68 percent said a totally blank prompt with no rules made them freeze up worse than a prompt with at least one weird limit. That surprised me because the go to advice in every prompt group I belong to is to just sit down and write with no plan at all. I tried that for a while, and honestly my best stuff came out when someone gave me a silly constraint, like a story that has to happen in a single elevator ride. When there are no walls, my brain just wanders off and I end up writing the same sad little scene about a rainy window. So I have started making my own fake rules before I begin, things like no dialogue for the first page or every sentence has to name a color. It feels backwards from what everyone shouts about, but the limits seem to be what gets me moving. Does anyone here actually get more done with a truly blank page, or do you secretly need a random rule too?

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sarahh481mo ago

The walls thing is real and it gets weirder the tighter you make them. Giving yourself a rule like "no dialogue for the first page" is good, but stacking a few dumb rules on top of each other pushes you into places you would never go on your own, like maybe the story has to stay in one room and someone has to be lying the whole time. Those two limits alone kill the rainy window scene because a liar in a locked room has to do something. Blank pages let you reach for the easiest image in your head, and for most of us that image is the same sad one every time.

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