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Spent an hour in a small town library and noticed something weird about their writing prompts board
I was killing time in a library in rural Oregon last month and they had a corkboard for local writers. Every prompt was basically "write about a magical forest" or "a mysterious letter arrives." I counted 12 prompts and 8 of them used the word "mysterious." No one was adding new ones. I asked the librarian and she said the board had the same prompts for 2 years. So I grabbed a marker and wrote 3 prompts based on stuff I saw out the window: a guy fixing a tractor, a storm rolling in, and a kid selling lemons at a stand. Someone added a story under the tractor one by the end of the week. Has anyone else seen writing groups get stuck recycling the same prompts?
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the_jamie1mo ago
...and nobody bothered to change them for two years? Did you get the feeling people just wanted to see their own names on the board instead of actually writing something new?
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alicecraig1mo ago
It's like people join committees just for the title, not the actual work anymore.
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evan_cooper731mo ago
Man, it's like that whole volunteer culture thing has kinda gone off the rails, right? I noticed this with my kid's little league board where half the people just wanted their names on the email list and never showed up to help with the snack stand or field cleanup. Maybe it's just me but it feels like people want the credit of being involved without actually doing the boring, messy stuff that makes things run.
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