Spent $80 on a writing prompt generator app and got nothing but garbage

I bit the bullet last month and bought some fancy prompt generator app for 80 bucks. Figured it would feed me unique ideas for my horror short stories. Nope. Every single prompt was stuff like 'write about a haunted house' or 'a character finds a mysterious letter.' Total waste. Did anyone else get burned by one of these tools or is there actually one that works?

3 comments

3 Comments

mark_green3d ago

Man, that sucks. I feel your pain, $80 is a lot to drop on something that gives you haunted house prompts like it's 1999. Those apps are basically just grabbing random stuff off the internet and calling it a day. You'd get better results by just opening a dictionary and stabbing your finger at random words. My honest two cents, just save your money and read a few weird news articles instead. That's where the real gold is for horror ideas. Hope you can get a refund on that thing.

ericcraig3d ago

Think you're spot on about them scraping random stuff. I tried one of those free trial things once and it kept giving me prompts about "a lone survivor in a post-apocalyptic wasteland." Like, no kidding, never heard that one before. Way better off just scrolling through Reddit's r/nosleep or reading old SCP entries, those always spark something weird.

fionam111d ago

Yeah, the "scraping random stuff" part is dead on. My mate tried one of those paid prompt generators and it spat out something about "a creaking door in an abandoned asylum" which is basically every horror movie from 2005. He ended up just using an old creepypasta wiki for better ideas.