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Vent: spent 4 months writing a 12 part story from one prompt about a lighthouse, and now I can't write anything else
Back in January I grabbed a prompt from a list I saw on Reddit about a lighthouse keeper who finds a message in a bottle, and it just snowballed into 12 parts and like 30,000 words. Now every time I sit down to start something new, my brain keeps dragging me back to that same keeper and his dumb island. I even caught myself sketching a map of the place on a napkin at a diner in Reno two weeks ago. How do you all break out of a world you built and actually move on to a fresh prompt?
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patricia5587d ago
The part about sketching a map on a napkin in Reno is the real tell here. That's not a hobby anymore, your brain has decided that island is a real place it lives in, and telling it to just stop is like telling yourself not to think about a pink elephant. What worked for me when I got stuck in one world too long was writing a short prequel about a side character, something tiny like 500 words, just to prove to myself the keeper's story had edges. Once I saw there were other people standing just outside the lighthouse, the spell kind of broke because the world stopped feeling endless. You could also try killing the keeper off in a one page scene, not for real, just as an exercise, because nothing makes a brain let go of a character faster than giving him a definite ending. Or lean into it and make the new prompt secretly be the same island a hundred years later, that way you get a fresh start without fighting your own head.
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