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My prompt jar failed me at 2am and I think the problem was how I built it
Honestly I need to vent about a system I built that totally fell apart. Back in January I made this big prompt jar, like 100 slips of paper, one writing prompt on each, color coded by genre. Sounds great right? Except last Tuesday around 2am I pulled a slip and it just said "a mailbox that lies." That was it. No character, no setting, no twist, nothing to push me. I sat there for 40 minutes and wrote two bad paragraphs before I gave up and went to bed mad. Here is what I think went wrong. I wrote all 100 prompts in one sitting at a coffee shop in Austin and I got lazy near the end, so the last 30 slips are basically just nouns with an adjective. A prompt has to have friction built in, like a person who wants something and a thing blocking them, or it's useless. Anybody else have a prompt system that started strong and then quietly rotted? Do you rewrite old slips or just toss the dead ones?
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