Just learned that 80% of creative writing prompts on social media are actually repurposed from a single 1990s writer's workbook

I stumbled on that fact while digging through a used copy of "The 3AM Epiphany" by Brian Kiteley at a thrift store last weekend, and now I can't unsee that same prompt structure everywhere.

3 comments

3 Comments

clark.robin28d ago

Oh man, I gotta push back a little on "most overused prompt" because honestly @stella_murray, that fairy tale one isn't even close to the worst offender. The real king of overused prompts from that workbook has gotta be "Write from the perspective of an inanimate object." I swear I see that exact thing word for word in like every writing group I'm in, and people act like they just invented it. But you're right that the 3AM Epiphany thing is wild, I actually took a creative writing class in 2018 and the professor straight up assigned prompts from it without telling us. Felt like I was in a huge inside joke I wasn't in on. The most annoying part is that workbook is actually solid, just too many people found the same shortcut and now it's everywhere.

stella_murray28d ago

Oh man, that finding haunts me now too. My own writing "routine" is basically just me mining old prompts from that era and calling it originality. Pretty sure my last three short stories all started with "Rewrite a fairy tale but make it about a modern problem" which is basically straight out of that workbook. The kicker is I even found a tattered copy of "The 3AM Epiphany" at a garage sale a few years back and thought I discovered a secret goldmine. Turns out I just found the same goldmine everyone else already dug up. What's the most overused prompt you see floating around that you think secretly comes from that book?

jenny_coleman10d ago

Blame it on the internet how everything cycles back around, I swear I see the same "write what you know" advice from my grandma's old typewriter days dressed up in modern language everywhere now. It's like we're all just reheating leftovers and calling it dinner.