PSA: I spent $40 on a 'premium' prompt book that was just a bunch of recycled ideas.

I bought a fancy book called '1,000 Story Sparks' online, thinking it would give me fresh angles, but half the prompts were things like 'write about a haunted house' or 'a character finds a key'. It felt like a total waste of money for stuff I could find for free. What's a good place to find actually unique writing prompts?

4 comments

4 Comments

karencampbell2mo ago

Honestly, calling "a haunted house" a recycled idea feels unfair. That basic setup is just a tool, and what matters is what you build with it. Paying for a book organizes those tools and saves you hours of digging through random blogs. The value is in having a curated starting point, not necessarily a never before seen concept.

aaronsullivan2mo ago

My old writing teacher used to say there are only seven stories anyway. The haunted house is just one of the boxes you can put them in. I spent a whole weekend once trying to find good info on Victorian mourning customs for a ghost story, and I would have paid ten bucks just to have a book point me to the right sources. The time is the real cost, not the book.

barbara_grant44d ago

Point out that most writing books are just repackaged blog posts anyway, so the real value is having someone else do the sorting instead of you scrolling through 30 tabs.

terry8352mo ago

I mean, how many hours are we really saving here... seems like a lot of fuss over a spooky house outline.