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Rant: a stranger at a diner in Tulsa tore up my flash fiction prompt and I still cannot decide if she was right
So last month I was at a Waffle House off I-44 in Tulsa around 1am with a notebook, working on a flash fiction prompt I grabbed off a random generator, the one where you write a 500 word story using only dialogue and no tags. This woman at the counter, maybe 60s, reading a paperback, glances over and asks what I am doing. I tell her, and she says something that has been rattling around my head since. She says prompts that tell you exactly how to build the thing are just paint by numbers, and the real writing comes from a plain boring prompt you have to fight your way out of. Part of me thinks she is right, because constraints do force weird choices I would never make otherwise. But another part of me thinks she is wrong, because a prompt that is too open just leaves me staring at a blank page for 40 minutes. Where do you all land on this? Do you like tight, rule heavy prompts like no adjectives or second person only, or the loose one word kind where you just get a setting and have to invent everything?
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elliotellis15d ago
The part where she loses me is acting like one way is the real way and the other is fake. Prompts are just a starting gun, they don't write the story for you either way. I've done the no dialogue tags thing and yeah it forces choices, but I've also stared at a one word prompt for an hour and gotten nothing, so it's not like loose prompts make you more of a real writer. What actually matters is whether you can hear the voices in your head before you start typing. Some nights a tight rule shuts the noise up long enough to get words down, other nights it just makes me mad. She sounds like she wanted to sound wise at 1am, which fair enough, diners do that to people.
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