TIL a good prompt can come from a bad line in a book

I was reading a cheap thriller from the airport last week and a character said, 'The silence was as loud as a freight train.' It was so clunky it made me laugh, but then I got thinking. I opened a doc and wrote 'Write a scene where silence is described as a physical object.' I ended up with a 500-word piece about a guy in a soundproof room where the quiet starts to feel like thick wool stuffing his ears. It totally changed how I see bad writing now. Instead of just putting a book down, I mine it for what not to do and flip it into a writing exercise. It's turned a lot of dud reads into useful practice. Has anyone else ever made a solid prompt out of something that was just plain bad?

2 comments

2 Comments

terry_barnes5d ago

Hey, maybe my old college essays weren't so bad after all, they're just a goldmine of what not to do.

noah_chen175d ago

Honestly I found my old essay from senior year and it had some decent ideas buried in there. Tbh the writing was rough but the core thoughts weren't all bad.