Went to a writer's retreat in Asheville and nobody talked about prompts

Spent a weekend at a cabin with 8 other writers and every single person wanted to workshop their novel but nobody had a single prompt to kickstart a new idea. Isn't the whole point of these gatherings to actually generate fresh material instead of just polishing old chapters? What do you all bring to retreats that actually gets words on the page?

2 comments

2 Comments

amyh1214d ago

Honestly, the "write about a door that shouldn't exist" prompt is exactly the kind of spark those retreats need. Ngl, I think the issue is people get too precious about their novels and forget that the whole point is to play around and mess up. Tbh, I always bring a bag of those little plastic dinosaurs and make everyone grab one and write from the dinosaur's point of view for ten minutes. It sounds dumb but it gets everyone laughing and writing without pressure, which is way more useful than another workshop session about chapter structure.

walker.julia15d ago

Went to one a few years back where this guy brought nothing but a stack of old rejection letters and a bottle of whiskey. Kept trying to get everyone to do this exercise where you rewrite the rejection as a poem. It was weird but actually kind of fun. I usually bring a couple of prompts from my phone that I saved from random twitter threads. Nothing fancy, just stuff like "write about a door that shouldn't exist" or "two people meet at a funeral but one of them is the deceased." Keeps things loose when everyone's tired of their own chapters.

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