Went to a local bookshop and their writing prompt wall was pure gold.

I stopped into this tiny used bookshop downtown last Saturday, the kind with cats sleeping on the shelves and coffee stains on the floor. They had this corkboard near the register covered in handwritten prompts from customers. I spent a solid 20 minutes reading them and ended up filling half a notebook. One prompt said 'write a story about a key that opens the wrong door' and another was 'describe your hometown through the eyes of a ghost.' It got me thinking that maybe we overthink prompts online when the best ones come from real people just scribbling on scrap paper. Have you ever stumbled on a random writing prompt in a weird place that stuck with you?

2 comments

2 Comments

charlesanderson9d ago

ngl I used to think stuff like that was kinda cheesy but honestly youre making me rethink that. the whole 'describe your hometown through the eyes of a ghost' prompt hits different when its just some random person scribbling it on paper instead of some tryhard online post.

dakota_taylor399d ago

Oh man, yeah that's exactly it for me too @charlesanderson. Like I tried one of those haunted hometown things once and it came out sounding like a bad Halloween card. But finding it on a napkin or whatever, that raw scribble? That feels real. Maybe I just have zero talent for that stuff, I think my ghost would just complain about the dust in my old apartment or something.