Question about prompts that dictate the ending before the story starts
I run a small writers group in Akron with 6 people, and lately half of them bring prompts like write a story where the hero learns to forgive her father, which basically hands you the last page before you write the first one. It bugs me because the good sessions we had back in March came from prompts that just set a weird situation, like a locked storage unit with one box left in it, and let the meaning show up on its own. Does anyone have a rule of thumb for spotting a prompt that tells you the takeaway too early and fixing it without gutting the idea?