That writing prompt about time travel made me ditch my outline

My critique partner Maria, who's been writing fanfic for 8 years, told me my chapter endings were too tidy, like every loop closed in 500 words. She pointed at a prompt about a time traveler who can only go back 3 minutes and said, 'You keep solving the puzzle instead of breaking it.' Since then I've been running every prompt through that lens, but now I'm second guessing myself, am I just making chaos for chaos's sake or is tension supposed to feel this messy?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_sean3d agoMost Upvoted

Trust messy, but check if every broken loop still pushes the story somewhere.

violag8012h ago

Maria sounds like she's trying to get you to write a whole novel of anxiety instead of just fixing your chapters. Next thing you know she'll be telling you your commas are too predictable and your protagonist needs to run over a mailbox every Tuesday. Messy is fine but you still need to know where the dang floor is, otherwise you're just writing chaos that looks like you spilled coffee on the keyboard and hit publish.