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I started rolling dice to pick my prompts and it unblocked me, but my writing group says that's cheating
I was stuck for almost 3 weeks on a short story about a guy who fixes clocks, just staring at a blank doc every night after work. So I made a list of 20 random things (a broken compass, a neighbor's dog, a spilled coffee) and started rolling a d20 to pick two. First roll gave me a cracked wristwatch and a bus ticket, and I cranked out 600 words in one sitting at a diner near my place in Boise. My writing group meets at a library on Thursdays and when I showed them the dice method, two people said it felt like cheating because the prompt did the hard part for me. But here's the thing, I still had to connect those random items into something that made sense, and honestly the randomness forced me to write scenes I never would have planned. The other side says a good writer should be able to sit down and find their own idea without props, and I get that too. So now I'm torn, is rolling dice for prompts a real tool or am I just avoiding the harder work of figuring out what I actually want to say? Anyone here tried random generators or dice for prompt ideas, and did it stick or did it feel like a crutch after a while?
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patricialee7d ago
Dice just distract you from the real work of knowing what you want to say.
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