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I wrote a prompt about a woman hiding cash in her freezer and my whole writing group spent 40 minutes arguing about her electric bill
Last Tuesday I brought a prompt to my writing group at the library in Reno about a character who stashes her savings in the freezer, and the whole room turned on me. Six people, all of them writers, spent 40 minutes stuck on whether her power would get shut off before the money mattered. I wanted to talk about why she chose the freezer in the first place, that tight feeling of hiding something from your own family, but nobody got past the math. So I scrapped the prompt and rewrote it the next night with zero dollar amounts, just a woman and a cold shelf and a locked door, and that version finally got people writing instead of debating. I think prompts with hard numbers in them make some folks freeze up and reach for the calculator instead of the page. Has anyone else had a prompt go sideways because the group latched onto some boring detail instead of the actual story?
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bennett.noah28d ago
Something like that happened at my old job when we did a team writing thing for fun. One guy wrote a scene about a guy stealing his neighbor's wifi and this one lady would not let go of the router password thing, kept asking if it was WPA2 or whatever, and we never got to the part about why the guy was broke in the first place. Same deal with the freezer, people grab the one number they can argue about and forget there's a person in there. Hard numbers give folks something to fight over so they don't have to feel the hard part.
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