The prompt generator was sabotaging my drafts for 6 months

I kept feeding random AI prompt generators into my WIP and every chapter felt flat, but I figured it was just my writing. Then last week I ran the same story idea through a simple 'what if the villain won' prompt and got 3 pages of usable plot in one sitting. Why did nobody tell me that vague prompts like 'write something cool' were the problem, and how do you guys actually phrase your prompts for specific scenes?

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harperschmidt6d ago

GEEZ, this hits close to home. My buddy Rick spent half a year stuck on a fight scene and kept using those flashy mega-prompts like "epic battle with emotional stakes." Then one day he just typed "the bad guy trips on a wet floor" and suddenly he had the whole scene mapped out with this darkly funny tone he was chasing the entire time. I swear, the simpler you make it, the more the generator has to actually THINK instead of just spitting out tropes. Now he just writes bare bone questions like "what does the detective notice first at the crime scene" and gets gold.