Tried writing a horror story using only prompt words from a random generator

Pulled up one of those fantasy name generators last week and forced myself to use every word it gave me in a 500 word story. Ended up with a haunted library that had a talking dragon librarian and a cursed vending machine. Has anyone else had a writing prompt backfire in a way that actually made the story better?

3 comments

3 Comments

wells.olivia21d ago

Okay so I gotta point out that what you made isn't really a "backfire" though... A backfire would be if the story turned out bad or made no sense. What you described sounds like it actually worked. The random words forced you to be creative in a way you wouldn't have been on your own. That haunted library with the dragon librarian and cursed vending machine honestly sounds super fun and original. Most people would just write something safe and predictable but those weird word combinations pushed you into something unique. That's not a backfire at all, that's the whole point of using a random generator as a tool. Sometimes we think a writing experiment failed when it actually just took us somewhere we didn't expect.

phoenixb3421d ago

Totally feel you on this, it's like we get so caught up in our own heads about what a story "should" be that we don't see when we've accidentally made something cool. Wendy's flatulent ghost story sounds like a masterpiece that nobody asked for but everyone needed, and that's kind of the magic of letting the weird stuff happen. It's a bummer when we call our own work a failure just because it didn't go the way we planned, when really it just went somewhere better.

wendyprice21d ago

Oh man, this reminds me of the time I used a random generator and it told me to write about a "flatulent ghost" - my story turned into this tragicomic mess where nobody could haunt properly because they kept ruining the mood. You're totally right that those wonky combos sometimes unlock the best stuff.