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Unpopular opinion: character prompts beat plot prompts every time I get stuck
For about a year I only used plot prompts, you know the ones like "a stranger knocks on the door with a suitcase." I'd write 300 words and then just sit there because I didn't care about the person walking around in my story. Then in March I switched to writing a full page about one character's morning routine before any plot showed up, and the same story idea suddenly had legs. The plot version died at 400 words, the character version ran to 2,000 without me forcing it. Anyone else find that knowing who someone is matters way more than knowing what happens to them?
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river_scott20d ago
How many of us wasted a whole year on plot prompts before figuring this out? I did the same thing. Wrote so many dead little stories where stuff happened but nobody in them felt real. Now I start with something dumb like what my character eats for breakfast or what they fight with their sister about, and the plot part basically writes itself after that. The funny thing is the plot ends up better too, because a real person would never do half the stuff my old cardboard characters did.
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