Debate: does a failed prompt belong in a portfolio or the trash?

Last Tuesday I spent 3 hours on a prompt for a fantasy short story contest, the one about a lighthouse keeper who wakes up as his own ghost. It flopped hard, the twist was predictable and the beta readers in my group called it lazy. But part of me wants to keep it as a learning piece, like a bad draft you show students in a workshop. My friend Dana says delete it, it's dead weight, but I think it shows my process. Which side are you on, do failed prompts stick around or get scrapped for good?

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alice_allen513d agoMost Upvoted

Three hours on one prompt is already sunk cost, so the real question is whether that file earns its space on your drive. Keep it, but not as a portfolio piece, strip it down to the skeleton of what went wrong and label it "twist check" or "pacing fail." I did that with a horror prompt last year where the reveal landed flat, and six months later I reused the same setup with a different payoff and it placed in a small contest. A failed prompt is like a cracked hammer, you don't display it, but you remember how it broke so you don't swing that way again. Dana's right if you're just hoarding it for nostalgia, but wrong if you're mining it for your next try.