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A guy at a Portland writers meetup said my prompt was doing too much, and he was right
I used to write these giant, sprawling creative writing prompts, like 200 words of setup with three characters and a twist and a specific ending I wanted people to reach. Then at a meetup in Portland about 4 months ago, this older guy read one of mine out loud, and he said something like, "You already wrote the story, we're just filling in the blanks." That stung but he was onto something. I went home and tried cutting a prompt down to one line, no names, no backstory, just a situation like "you find a locked box behind your childhood home, describe what's inside without saying what it is." The replies I got were way more varied and weird than anything I got before, because people had room to move. I still write longer prompts sometimes but I try to keep the setup under 30 words if I can. Curious if other people here have gotten feedback that made you shorten things up, or do you think long prompts actually give more to work with?
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owens.cameron1mo ago
What if the whole point of a prompt is to share a vision and not just toss out a blank page? That guy at your meetup might have been right for his group, but a long prompt can hand people a mood, a voice, a world they would never build on their own, and that is not a bad thing. When I give someone a line about a locked box, half the replies are jokes or stuff I have seen a hundred times, because with no walls people just run to the same safe ideas. Give them a diner at 3am, a brother who owes money, and a specific ache in the room, and suddenly they are writing inside something instead of skating on top of it. It is a trade off, more room means more weird, but also more shallow, and I would rather read one great thing that fits a strong setup than fifty random ones. Maybe the fix is not shorter, maybe it is sharper, make every word in those 200 do work and cut the ones that just boss people around. So what makes you sure the shorter prompts got better stuff and not just more of it?
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