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I gave my writers group the same prompt twice, 8 months apart, and the difference was wild
So I run a small writing group out of a coffee shop in Tacoma, six of us, and back in January I handed out a prompt that was just the line "the door was already open." Got the usual stuff, lots of vague dread, a few ghost stories, one guy wrote 900 words about a cheating husband. Fine, whatever. Then two weeks ago I handed out that exact same line again without telling anyone, and 4 of the 6 people wrote something totally different in a way I didn't expect. The ghost story person wrote a scene about a mom letting her kid walk to school alone for the first time, no ghosts at all. The cheating husband guy wrote 6 lines and then stopped and said "I don't have anything left for this." I think what changed is they stopped trying to write what a prompt is "supposed" to get out of them and just wrote what was actually bugging them that day. It made me wonder if reusing old prompts on purpose is the move, like a check in every few months. Anyone here ever circle back to a prompt you gave a group before and get totally different work out of it?
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paul4161d ago
Six writers in a Tacoma coffee shop and four of them flipped their whole thing? That is either the most useful writing exercise I have ever heard of or you just accidentally tricked your group into therapy. Either way, I want in. The cheating husband guy is the one that gets me, because he did not even switch genres, he just quit. That is a guy who wrote the thing he thought a prompt wanted the first time and then ran out of fake juice on round two. I have done a version of this with a poetry group back in college, same prompt three semesters apart, and my own stuff went from trying to sound deep to writing about my dad's truck, which is way less cool but at least it was true. Eight months is a smart gap because it is long enough that people forget the trap but short enough that they are not totally different humans yet. Just do not tell them it is the same line next time, the second you say that, everyone starts performing for the experiment instead of just writing.
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