Scene Prompts - What Should Your Character Do Next?
These are NOT your typical writing prompts.
I find most writing prompts too general or specific to be helpful. The ones in this book are just generic enough to spark your imagination and everyone's response will be completely different. Depending on your story idea, plot, characters and writing style, the response to the following prompts will look vastly different from another writer's.
How does this work? Well, when you hit a roadblock in a particular scene, play with one of the prompts and see how your character responds, what comes out of their mouth. Then, let the other characters respond to that line. Here's an example. For the following prompt, I can have a character respond one of many ways (and I literally just came up with these as I'm writing this book summary).
SAMPLE PROMPT - Ask someone to leave
Now, what's the next line out of your character's mouth? Is it:
-- You know what, get the hell out!
-- Look, I'm tired. Can we talk about this tomorrow? I'll have Peter drive you home.
-- Will you please just leave! I can't do this. I can't talk to you anymore!
-- Either he goes or I go. Which will it be?
See how all these are very different ways for a character to essentially ask (or try to force) another character to leave? The key is to work with the response that works best for your situation. You should have a sense of what the scene is about and your character's goals, but that's all you really need!
I love these prompts. You can insert them any time you hit a wall. They always seem to get my creative juices going. Sometimes I find that I've gone on to write an entire scene and I didn't even end up keeping the lines that the prompts generated! It was enough just to get me unstuck and get my characters interacting again.
I hope these prompts can help others too. If folks vote and comment to let me know that they've helped, I'll post 10 prompts per chapter for the next 10 weeks. Cheers! We'll start with a chapter and a bonus one too.
