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Started taping a brown paper bag to my desk and my story prompts finally got somewhere
I kept writing the same boring prompts over and over, usually starting with a person walking into a room. So last month I tried something different and taped a paper bag to my desk with the words "one object only" written on it. Every time I got stuck I would pull a random thing from my kitchen junk drawer, like a dead battery or a bent key, and build a prompt around that one item with no people allowed. It forced me to think about setting and mood instead of dialogue, and I got 12 prompts out of it in a week. If you try this, what random object from your own house would make the weirdest writing prompt?
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mark_thomas10d ago
Taping a bag to your desk feels more like a placebo than a real method if I'm being honest. Anyone can force prompts out of random junk, that's not the hard part, the hard part is making them good and 12 in a week doesn't actually tell us anything about quality. Grabbing a dead battery or a bent key just gives you a starting point, it doesn't fix the boring writing that made you want to change things up in the first place. Sounds like you just needed a new habit more than a magic paper bag.
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