Tried a writing prompt swap at a cafe in Portland, now I do them every week

I was stuck on a scene where two characters meet after 10 years, so I asked a stranger at Common Grounds to give me a random object and emotion from their own life. They said 'a cracked phone screen' and 'betrayed by a sibling', which completely flipped my plot in a way I never expected. Has anyone else tried pulling prompts from real people instead of prompt lists, and did it work for you?

2 comments

2 Comments

victor_jones9921d ago

And you can take it further by turning their actual story into a side character, that's how I got my best subplot yet.

the_elliot21d ago

That cracked phone screen thing really hit for me. I did something similar last month at a bus stop, asked this older guy for a word that reminded him of his twenties and he said 'payphones'. Just that, nothing else. I ended up writing this whole scene where my main character gets a call on a payphone from someone who's supposed to be dead, and the whole chapter turned into this weird thing about how we wait for calls that never come. The stranger's face when I told him he inspired a plot twist was worth more than any prompt list I've ever paid for. People give you the raw stuff if you ask them right, not the polished stuff you find online.