This week: Prompt Problems Edited by: Jeff  
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About The Editor: Greetings! My name is Jeff and I'm one of the regular editors of the official Action/Adventure Newsletter! I've been a member of Writing.com since 2003, and have edited more than 400 newsletters across the site in that time. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email me directly or submit feedback in the comment box at the bottom of this newsletter. |
Prompt Problems
Over the course of my twenty-plus years here on Writing.com, I've entered and run hundreds of rounds of contests and activities. In that time, I've seen prompts that have generated dozens of enthusiastic entries, and prompts that have failed to get a single entry.
As an organizer, I've posted prompts that I was genuinely excited about, only to watch participation numbers crater. I've seen others that I threw together almost as an afterthought and watched them somehow brought people out of the woodwork. As an entrant, I've found prompts that had me racing to open a blank word processor document the moment I read the prompt, and others where I spent days or even weeks trying to figure out how to get excited about the prompt.
After all of that, I'm of the belief that most prompt problems fall into one of two general categories, and that understanding and navigating the difference between them is immensely helpful, whether you're the one writing the prompt or the one responding to it.
The Generic Prompt Problem
The first type of prompt problem is the one you'll encounter most often: the prompt that's so broad it could mean almost anything. "Write a story about love." "Write a poem about nature." "Write a piece about overcoming adversity." "Here's a photo of a barn." These prompts are designed with the best of intentions; organizers who employ these prompts often want to cast a wide net and give writers as much creative freedom as possible. And on the surface, that seems like a good thing. More freedom should mean more creativity, right?
In practice, the opposite is often true. When a prompt gives you nothing to push against, react to, or specific to spark your imagination, the blank page can feel even more intimidating than usual. Without any constraints, writers tend to default to the most obvious interpretation of the prompt; the safest, most familiar version of "love" or "nature" or "adversity" that comes to mind, or a story that takes place on a generic farm where the image prompt is literally described in the text of the entry. The result is a batch of entries that are perfectly competent but tend to feel oddly similar, like everyone writing their own version of the same premise. As an entrant, I find these prompts the hardest to get excited about, precisely because they give me so much room that I don't know where to start.
The Niche Prompt Problem
The second type of prompt problem is the inverse of the first. This is the prompt that's so specific that it immediately excludes a significant portion of potential entrants. "Write a story set during the Second Punic War." "Write a poem about the experience of learning to play jazz piano." "Write a piece that combines the genre elements of paranormal romance and westerns." These prompts often come from a place of genuine passion; the organizer may love the subject and wants to read those types of entries, or may be attempting to challenge the entrants to write outside their comfort zones.
I'll confess that I've been guilty of this one myself. There have been times where I've written a prompt that I found genuinely thrilling, only to realize after the fact that my enthusiasm was based on a deep personal interest in a subject that not everyone shares. As an entrant, I've also been on the receiving end of these prompts; the ones where I can see exactly what the organizer was going for, and I can even appreciate the creativity behind it, but I just don't have enough connection to the subject matter to find my way in. The participation numbers tend to give away pretty quickly how popular these niche prompts actually are.
The Third Option
So if generic prompts produce uninspired entries and niche prompts limit participation, what's the alternative? The answer, I've found, isn't to split the difference and land somewhere in the middle. A prompt that's "somewhat specific" isn't necessarily better than one that's too vague or too narrow. The real goal is to be specific about the feeling or situation you want to evoke, rather than the literal subject matter.
Think about the difference between "write a story about loss" and "write a story about the moment you realize something is gone that you can never get back." Both prompts are ostensibly about the same thing, but the second one gives the writer something much more concrete to work with — a specific emotional moment, a particular kind of realization — without dictating what that something has to be. It could be a person, a place, a version of yourself, a relationship. The subject is wide open, but the emotional target is clear. That specificity is actually liberating rather than limiting, because it tells the writer exactly what they're aiming for and leaves the creative choices entirely up to them.
The best prompts I've encountered, both as an entrant and as an organizer, tend to work this way. They have a distinct point of view. They feel like they were written by someone who cared about what the entries would feel like to read, not just what the entries would be about from a narrative standpoint. And perhaps most importantly, they make you feel like there's something worth saying with your entry.
Some additional prompt examples along these lines:
 Write a conversation where what was said mattered far less than what wasn't.
Write about a moment of unexpected understanding between two very different people.
Write about a character's last interaction with a beloved person or place, knowing it will be the last one.
Write about a situation where your character thought s/he understood something completely, only to realize they didn't really understand it at all.
The next time you sit down to write a prompt, or find yourself staring at one and trying to figure out how to get excited about it, it's worth asking a simple question: is this prompt specific about the right things? Not specific about subject matter in a way that boxes writers in, and not so vague that it gives them nothing to hold onto, but specific about the feeling, the situation, the emotional territory it wants to explore. A prompt written that way is an invitation rather than an assignment. And in my experience, writers respond to invitations a lot more enthusiastically than they respond to assignments.
And if you're looking at a contest or activity you want to enter that doesn't have a compelling prompt... add one onto the top of it! There's absolutely no reason you can't write a story based on an image prompt of a barn, and also apply the additional prompt of "write about a character's last interaction with a beloved place, knowing it will be the last one." That kind of additional complication might be just the thing that gets you energized to tackle a prompt which, at first glance, didn't do much for you.
Until next time,
Jeff
If you're interested in checking out my work:
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Contests & Activities: March 11, 2026 Issue [#13635]
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