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I swore off writing prompts that give you the ending first, then a guy at a diner in Omaha flipped my whole thing
For about 6 months I only wrote from "tell the reader what the twist is right away" style prompts because I thought hiding the ending was a cheap trick. Then a writer I met at a diner in Omaha slid me a prompt that was just the last line of a story with no setup, and I sat there stuck for 40 minutes. I picked the hidden-ending version and wrote a 900 word piece about two brothers fighting over a truck, and it came out better than anything I did in those 6 months of open-book prompts. The reason is dumb and simple: when the reader knows the ending, every line before it has to earn its place. I learned that saying the ending out loud first kills my own urge to wander around, because I already know where I'm going. I still write open-ended prompts when I just want to play with voice and not plot, maybe 2 out of every 10 sessions. What prompt format made you change your mind about how you write, and what was the actual piece that did it?
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