A writing prompt about a dying phone made me rethink my whole plot structure

I was scrolling prompts last night and saw one that was basically 'your phone only has 5% battery and you can't charge it, what do you do?' It sounded dumb at first, but I actually tried writing it. Every response I came up with was just panic and texting, so boring. Then I thought about what my character would delete or who they'd call if they knew it was their last chance to say something. That one little constraint forced me to cut all the filler dialogue and get to the emotional core in under 300 words. Has anyone else found a random prompt that changed how they approach scenes, or was it just me?

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felix_williams711mo ago

Oh man, I had a friend who got stuck on a prompt about a character with one shoe and ended up rewriting their whole opening chapter around it. Weirdest thing, but the scene about searching for the shoe became the best tension builder they ever wrote.