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My writing group made me pick between a prompt about a locked door or a lost dog, and I chose wrong
Our group meets at a diner in Boise every other Sunday, and last time the leader put two index cards face down on the table and said pick one. I grabbed the locked door card, thinking I could do some creepy mystery thing, but everyone who got the lost dog prompt came back with these gut punch little stories while mine turned into 4 pages of a guy just jiggling a handle. The dog people had crying scenes and a letter to a vet and a little kid's sock, and I had a door. Next time I'm picking the animal card, no question, but is there a trick to making a stuck object prompt actually go somewhere?
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michaela1615d ago
Back in 2019 my screenwriting meetup in Portland did the exact same thing with a "broken clock" card versus a "missing brother" card and I grabbed the clock because I thought oh, I can do time loops and symbolism. Two weeks later I had six pages of a guy staring at a stopped clock on a wall and one guy in the group wrote about his actual brother who left for Alaska and never called, and the whole room went quiet. The clock script got one polite nod. My theory now is that a stuck object only works if a person is connected to it, like the door needs a name carved in it or a key that belonged to somebody's mom, otherwise it's just a thing sitting there. The animal prompts force you to put a person in the scene right away because somebody has to feed it or lose it. Next time make the door belong to a specific person and give it a history and you'll probably be fine.
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