What’s This About Weird Prompts?
Since we launched, we’ve had a number of folks reach out and ask when we mean by strange/unique/weird prompts.
And you know what? That’s fair, and we probably should have seen it coming.
In this blog post, I want to walk you through how we’re thinking about our prompts. Our goal is to make them fun and engaging in order to spark creativity—but without having participants feel like they’re stuck writing something they don’t want to.
I’ve done a ton of writing comps at this point, and I genuinely enjoy them. But sometimes, the prompts strike me as a bit lackluster. Mind you, I’ve gotten some great stories out of prompts I didn’t love at first glance—but I’ve also been really stuck on occasion trying to navigate things that didn’t spark joy.
Odd Embers grew out of my thinking about why I sometimes didn’t like a particular prompt, and how I thought I might go about providing prompts that I’d be excited to receive every time.
Before we get to what our prompts look like, let’s talk about common kinds of prompts, and why there’s room for a different approach.
Too General
Perhaps the most common kind of prompt is what I think of as the generic prompt: a swimming pool, a pocket watch, etc. These are fine, as far as they go, but they can feel (to me, anyway) more like an assignment. It’s my job to fit them in, even though they don’t really lend themselves to a story idea. I have to come up with a story idea, and then fold in a pocket watch.
Many competitions provide more than one of these—okay, so I’ve got a pocket watch AND a swimming pool. Well, maybe someone lost their watch, or it got stolen from their locker. This is definitely closer to the kind of thing I’m looking for when doing writing competitions—I can see the seeds of a story forming in the connections between the two things far more easily than an object in isolation.
That said, I think there’s a way to make every prompt invite that kind of ideation, which is why I created Odd Embers. But before we talk about what we’re doing differently, we need to talk about the prompts that overcorrect in the other direction by being too specific.
Too Specific
One solution to the “too generic” problem is providing very specific prompts. Maybe it’s not just a pocket watch, but it’s a pocket watch that you found at a garage sale, and it’s mysteriously engraved with your initials.
Now, that’s not a bad seed for a story—but I’m not sure it works well for a competition. It’s already pushing towards a specific type of story. “Mysterious” is doing a lot of work, and prevents the initials being just a coincidence—even if it you have an idea for using that as an intriguing inciting incident.
To be honest, I have a love/hate relationship with these kinds of prompts. If they’re something I find particularly intriguing, then I’m all in and they really help. But if it’s something that doesn’t resonate, I find it does the opposite—it really pushes me away from being able to come up with a story I’m excited to write.
The Odd Embers Solution: Just Right
Our mantra for Odd Embers is specific but not constraining.
So, if pocket watch were one of our prompts, it might be something like “a pocket watch that never tells the right time.”
With this level of specificity, it still works if you’re after another idea and want an “insert” like a general prompts—it’s simple enough to have a character who’s always late because of their bloody watch.
But we hope that the specificity will invite you to explore a wider range of what that prompt might mean.
Is the watch broken, and if so, why? Is it sentient and literally just refuses to be helpful because it has an attitude problem? Is it a time-travel device, so it never reads the current time, but instead reads the time it’s set to? Has someone sabotaged your main character’s watch to make them always be late?
You can see how, with that one little twist on pocket watch, we’ve not only opened up a variety of story angles, but a variety of different genres that it could fit into (which is part of the reason we don’t specify a genre—write what speaks to you!).
It’s worth mentioning here that we are very open to unique interpretations of our prompts. They’ve all been designed like the pocket watch example above, to give you a range of options to explore as you’re thinking through ideas. As long as we can squint and see that you were engaging with the prompt, you’ll be good.
We hope that this will make your choice of prompts feel empowering rather than like an assignment where you have to hit the rubric to get a good score.
What Do Odd Embers Prompts Look Like?
“What’s that, you say? Choice of prompts?”
We haven’t discussed exactly how prompts are going to be presented just yet—and it may vary across competitions!—but for Ember’s First Contest, you’ll be presented with prompts in three categories: an item, a location, and an action. You’ll need incorporate two prompts from two different categories into your story. No bonus points for doing a prompt from all three, but you’re welcome to give it a go if doing so sparks something for you!
Join us!
If you haven’t already signed up, we’ll hope you’ll join us for Ember’s First Contest, kicking off on Friday, January 30!