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The prompt that made me quit writing for 3 days
Honestly, I still think about this one person from a workshop in Austin last spring. She read my 200 word prompt about a janitor who finds a locked door, then said it was “too neat” and asked what the door smelled like. I froze, because I had zero answer, and she just shrugged and walked off. That one question wrecked my whole outline, but it also made me rewrite the scene with five senses instead of plot. Three days later I had a story that actually felt alive, not just a checklist of events. Anyone else ever had a stranger's offhand note completely derail and then save their draft?
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gray31410d ago
Yeah that's basically every writing workshop in a nutshell, some random person says one weird thing and suddenly your whole plot is just a pile of old smells. I'd rather she just told me the door was haunted or something.
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