Appreciation post: That prompt exercise that took 12 hours to finish

I joined a flash fiction challenge in the "Blue Lake Writers" group and the prompt was just one weird sentence about a talking squirrel. I figured I'd knock it out in an hour, but I ended up rewriting the whole thing four times because the dialogue felt flat. It took me from 8 PM until 8 AM the next morning, and I still only hit 800 words. Has anyone else spent way too long on a single prompt before?

3 comments

3 Comments

cameronf8814d ago

12 hours on a talking squirrel, @the_mary, I did that with a haunted mailbox prompt once.

diana_black14d ago

Honestly, "write it ugly and messy" is solid advice but I'd push back a little on only polishing twice. Some sentences just need that third pass to really click, you know?

the_mary14d agoProlific Poster

Twelve hours on 800 words sounds about right when you keep chasing that perfect version. Next time, try writing the whole thing start to finish without looking back at the first page. That way you get the whole story down before you decide what needs fixing. I've had prompts where I spent three hours on just the opening paragraph, then trashed it all and started over from scratch with a completely different angle. The best advice I got was to write it ugly and messy, then polish only twice. Any more than that and you're just spinning your wheels.