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My old writing teacher said prompts should never be questions, and now I can't stop noticing it
I ran into my old writing teacher, Mrs. Alvarez, at a coffee shop in Tucson last week and she mentioned that she always told students to avoid question prompts because they box you in. I looked back at the last 30 prompts I saved in my notebook and 22 of them were questions like "what if you woke up somewhere else?" which might explain why my drafts all sound the same. Do you think question prompts actually limit what you can write, or is that just how she liked to teach it?
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alice_hart7d ago
Wait, 22 out of 30?! That is wild, I never counted mine before but now I kind of want to. Honestly she might be onto something, because a question already hands you the shape of the answer, so you just fill in the blank instead of finding your own way in. Maybe try rewriting a few of those as statements and see if your drafts start to sound different.
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