I tried writing about a character who finds a single red mitten in the snow and it unlocked a whole week of terrible writer's block.

In my experience, that simple prompt about the mitten made me overthink every detail for seven days straight, so has anyone else had a prompt that seemed easy but completely stalled you out?

4 comments

4 Comments

williamw751mo ago

Yeah, I read a blog post once where someone said their killer prompt was just "a locked door." They spent days trying to decide what was behind it, who locked it, and why it mattered, and wrote zero actual story. It's crazy how the smallest, simplest idea can make your brain spin in circles trying to make it perfect. What was the first thing you overthought with that mitten?

jordan_hill1mo ago

Honestly, the color. Got stuck for an hour on whether it was a sad, faded blue or a bright, cheerful one. That rabbit hole led to a whole imaginary kid's favorite cartoon character. Wound up just describing it as "damp and blue" and moving on before I wrote a biography for a piece of clothing.

harris.andrew1mo ago

See, I get that. But I've always found that overthinking is part of the process, not a waste of time. With the mitten, I spent a whole afternoon deciding if it was lost or deliberately left behind. That led me to the kid's whole backstory. Without that spin, I'd just have a wet mitten on a bench and nowhere to go. The locked door guy might not have written pages, but he built a whole world in his head. That counts for something.

nelson.wren13d ago

I mean, the part about building a whole world in your head counting for something. Idk, maybe it's just me but that's the trap. If you don't write any of it down, you didn't build anything for anyone else. It's just a daydream. The locked door guy had a whole world that died with his train of thought. Getting a single sentence about the damp blue mitten onto the page is worth more than a perfect unwritten epic.