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Showerthought: A prompt that gives you the ending first, cheating or genius?
My writing group in Tulsa split hard on this: half said a prompt like 'write the last line first' kills the discovery, half said it saved them from 20 pages of nothing. Where do you land?
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spencer98121d ago
I had this same fight with myself last year when I was stuck on a short story about a guy losing his dad's watch. Wrote maybe 15 pages of him just driving around town, getting coffee, staring at stuff. Then I tried writing the last line first, just one sentence, and it was "he never found it and stopped looking." Suddenly every scene had a job. I could cut the coffee shop stuff because it wasn't doing anything for that ending. Idk, maybe some people need the mystery to keep going, but for me knowing the last line gave the middle a reason to exist instead of just being me killing time.
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bennett.evan21d ago
The "20 pages of nothing" thing hit me hard because that was me all last year, just pages and pages of my guy walking around town doing nothing that mattered. So I started writing the last line first and it changed everything, now I know where I'm going even if I take the long way to get there. I get why people say it kills the discovery part, and yeah sometimes the ending shifts on me by page ten and that's fine too. But knowing the target means I can tell when a scene is just me stalling, which honestly was most of my problem. Half your group is right and I'm on that side, write the last line first and let the middle surprise you instead.
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