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Hot take: does every prompt need a clear ending, or can it just sit there?
I was in a small writing group in Portland last week and a guy named Marcus read a prompt that just said 'a woman waits at a bus stop with two bags and no coat.' He asked us to write for 20 minutes and half the room wrote endings where she gets on the bus, and the other half left her standing there. Marcus said prompts with no ending are lazy, but a woman next to me said forcing a tidy ending kills the whole point of the exercise. I honestly still don't know which side I'm on, because I wrote her getting on the bus and it felt fake. So where do you land: should a prompt hand you a finish line, or should it leave you stuck in the middle of the scene?
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jessicajohnson17d ago
Marcus is right though, and the lady next to you was wrong. A prompt is a recipe, not a fridge full of random stuff. If you hand someone a scene with no finish line, you're basically asking them to wander around in the dark and call it art, and most people just freeze or write something soft and pointless. "A woman waits at a bus stop with two bags and no coat" is fine as an opening image, but without a target, nobody knows if she's leaving someone, running from something, or just bad at planning for weather. The fake feeling you got writing her onto the bus probably wasn't because endings are bad, it was because THAT ending was bad, and a prompt that forces you to pick one would have made you commit instead of shrug.
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