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DAE rewrite prompts when they fall flat, or trash them and start over?
I spent 3 hours last Friday on a prompt about a lighthouse keeper who finds a message in a bottle, and when I read it back to my group in Portland, two people said it was too vague and one said it was too specific, so now I'm stuck wondering if a broken prompt means the idea was bad or just the wording.
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gavin2281mo ago
The "too vague and too specific" thing hits home because that happened to me last year with a prompt about a truck driver stuck at a weigh station. What worked for me was keeping the idea and tossing the wording, not the other way around. I read it out loud to myself and realized I had buried the actual hook under a bunch of setting details nobody asked for. So I cut the first two paragraphs and started right when the guy notices something weird in his mirror, and suddenly people got it. A broken prompt usually means the wording is off, not the idea, because if the idea was truly bad you wouldn't have spent 3 hours on it in the first place. My test now is simple: can I say the whole prompt in one sentence to a friend without rambling? If I can't, it needs a rewrite, not a funeral.
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