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Sat through a 2 hour webinar on Tuesday and learned my prompts have been way too nice to my characters
So I've been writing short stories off and on for a couple years and I always hit this wall around page 4 where everything feels flat and I can't figure out why. Last Tuesday I sat through a free webinar from a lit mag in Portland, mostly because it was raining and I had nothing else going on. The host said something that just stopped me cold: she asked how many of us feel bad making our characters suffer, and I swear half the chat said yes. Then she gave us a prompt where the character has to lose the one thing they think they can't live without, in 200 words, no rescue allowed. I wrote mine in like 20 minutes and it was the best thing I've done all year. Realized I've been protecting my people the whole time, giving them soft landings and tiny problems. So now I'm building a stack of prompts that specifically force me to be mean to them. Has anybody found a prompt that breaks you out of that habit, or is it just something you have to keep catching yourself doing?
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the_ruby10d ago
Wrote a scene last month where my main character gets fired from the bakery she built from nothing and I literally stopped mid sentence because I felt bad for her lol. Finished it after like 3 days of avoiding my laptop and it ended up being the first thing I've ever had accepted by a journal. Now I keep a note on my phone called "be mean" and every time I start a new story I read it first. One thing that helps me is asking what my character would never admit out loud, then making the story force them to say it. Also tried writing one where the love interest just leaves with no explanation and no goodbye, no text, nothing, and that was brutal but so good. So yeah its not just you, it's a habit you have to keep catching, but it gets easier once you see how much better the writing gets when you stop saving them.
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