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Read that a guy wrote 1,000 prompts on index cards and none of them started with 'what if'
Saw this on a writing blog last night, he said all 1,000 of his cards started with a person, a place, or a line of dialogue instead. I tried it for 20 minutes and got three usable ideas, which is more than I get in an hour of staring at a blank doc. What's your go-to move when a prompt just will not land?
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the_fiona15d ago
My buddy Dave keeps a shoebox of gas station receipts and writes one line on the back of each one whenever an idea hits him. He ended up with like 300 of them over a year and said maybe 12 were good, but he sold two short stories off that pile. The trick for him was never sitting down to "write a prompt," he just caught stuff as it happened. When a card dies on me I flip it over and write down the last dumb thing someone said to me that day, works better than forcing it. Twenty minutes for three ideas is honestly a solid rate, don't mess with whatever you did.
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