Prompts

For someone who says she doesn’t like discussing fanfiction, I sure talk about it a lot XD;

I’ve always found the concept of prompts intriguing. In the fanfic world it’s a driving force, almost as powerful as peer pressure :P Someone comes up with a word or phrase, and it’s a challenge for the writer to include it in the fic to be written.

However, some prompts don’t work like this – you don’t need to include them in the pieces you write, they’re really just there to inspire. A prompt could be something as simple as “rain” or as complicated as “we can spin the sun around.” The resulting story could be anything from a 100-word “drabble” to a full-blown 27-part epic.

…I’ve found that I don’t really respond well to prompts. But I think it would be really interesting to try that with original fiction, especially if the person issuing the prompt is someone like FH “Ichi” Batacan, author of Smaller and Smaller Circles, who is by the way also the guest editor for the PGS Special Crime/Mystery/Suspense Issue, which merits its own blog post.

Ichi aims to inspire Pinoy writers to write more crime fiction. I wonder if, as with fanfics, we can have an online venue for the pieces we’ve finished? Alternatively, we could just keep our fiction to ourselves, and let it brew and keep refining it until it’s ready to be submitted to paying markets. You know – the traditional way :)

Ichi’s first prompt is a bit tough, I think – a recent major rogue trading scandal. But because it’s tough, it’s worth doing!

Another thing that prompted (lame pun intended) me to write this post is the existence of Talecraft, a proudly Philippine-made fantasy-based story creation game. I confess I haven’t looked into the game yet, but it seems to operate based on the prompts method as well. I’ll probably write more about it when I’ve checked out the game myself.