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There it is: the perfect prompt. A prompt that appeals to you in every way. A prompt that excites you so much that you can only hope to do it justice. Or maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe you’ve got 24 hours to respond to this prompt and no idea where to start. Don’t panic; we’re here to help.
Welcome to Navigating Prompts, a year-long workshop series designed to help you go from assignment to execution–and maybe even to winning or publication!
All aboard
Here’s how this series will work:
Each month, we’ll talk you through how to analyze and respond to a specific prompt style. We’ll coordinate the weekly prompts with the monthly post so you’ll have a chance to practice, compare notes with other writers in the Coffeehouse, and get advice from beta readers and YeahWrite editors. You’ll get to hone your skills when you’re not in crisis mode, trying to meet that fast-approaching deadline. And who knows—maybe you’ll end up with a new story or two in your back pocket!
The destination
Whether you’re participating in a fast-paced flash competition, submitting to a themed anthology, or sending an essay to a niche publication or call for submissions, your job is to give the judges or editors exactly what they’re looking for: a solid story told within specific parameters that is still uniquely your own.
But how do you know exactly what they’re looking for? What makes for a perfect response? Why was your story rejected?
It all comes down to how you use the prompt.
First of all, it doesn’t matter how much a judge or editor likes your story if they cannot find the prompt. Your story might be brilliant, innovative, engaging, and an absolute pleasure to read. If it doesn’t satisfy the prompt, it will be rejected.
Secondly, it’s rarely enough to just “include” the prompt; you need to integrate it into your work. In competitions, judges want to see how well an individual can build a story using – not just nodding at – the given prompt(s). If the prompt is unimportant to the story—if it could be replaced with anything else, a banana instead of a shoe, for example—the judges will notice, and the story’s score will inevitably suffer. For anthologies, editors are looking for stories that go together thematically. Editing an anthology is like making a mixtape, and the editors need to put together a well-balanced and cohesive publication. If most of the songs on your mixtape are heavy metal rock ballads, that one country crooner is not going to fit, no matter how good the song is. Similarly, if an editor is compiling stories set on moons, a deep-sea diving story isn’t going to make the cut even if the diving platform is named The Moon.
So what’s a writer to do?
Ready, set, go
This month, we’ll be taking a hard look at the ubiquitous—and deceptively difficult—”object” prompt.
So what is an “object” prompt? At its most basic, it’s an object that must be included in your story. Whether it’s a baseball, an obelisk, or a tinfoil hat, you have to add it to the story somewhere.
But is it really that simple? No. It’s not. Let’s unpack the object prompt, and look at how to center it in your story.
Why is it here?
For many competitions, the object prompt is included to help make sure that you didn’t write the story in advance, workshop it, and then submit it.
It can also be part of a combination prompt, which is something we’ll deal with later in the year.
In either case, though, it’s important to integrate the object fully into your story.
How do you use it?
A lot of people’s first impulse is to treat the object prompt like a checkbox. Did the bottle opener appear in the story? Whew, I’m good. But that’s not enough to get you a good score, or to really integrate the prompt. Look at these two sample paragraphs. Put yourself in the place of a judge. And ask yourself: which story will get the higher score from you for using the prompt well?
1. Jenna dug through her purse: lipstick, bottle opener, tampon, key card to a hotel she hadn’t been to in a month. When she finally found her car keys she was relieved. She slid into the car and revved the engine. Soon, she’d be with Marshall again–if the kidnapper kept their word.
2. Jenna frantically searched her pockets until she found the bottle opener. The sealed potion bottle yielded quickly to her frantic prying, and she poured the healing elixir between Marshall’s lips. “Hold on,” she begged. “They’ll be here soon.”
The odds are good that you said 2, right? In 1, you could have replaced the bottle opener with a banana, and it wouldn’t have made any difference to the story. In 2, however, the object was used to solve a problem. And not any problem, but a problem with actual stakes for failure: if Jenna hadn’t been able to open the potion bottle, Marshall might have died.
This is the difference between including and integrating a prompt. In fact, in 1, could you even tell if the story had originally been written with different objects? No? Then neither can the judges. But in 2, the story literally couldn’t happen if Jenna had a banana in her pocket instead. And those few points can mean the difference between moving on and ‘thanks for playing’ in a tight competition.
So what are the elements of an integrated object prompt?
First, the object will be important to the story. That means that if it were a different object, the characters couldn’t respond to it the same way.
Second, the consequences of not having or using the object should matter. If you don’t have the tinfoil hat, you can’t stop the alien brain takeover! If you don’t have the key, you can’t unlock the handcuffs. And in either case, your character will suffer the consequences of failure.
How can you tell if you’ve done it right? Well, try replacing every time your object is used with “rutabaga.” If that doesn’t fundamentally change your story (or make it ridiculous) you haven’t successfully integrated the prompt.
Your turn!
Check out our weekly prompt posts and try to tell a story using the object prompts given. Don’t forget to ask for help in the Coffeehouse if you’ve got questions – you can post a link to your draft, or even just say “hey, I’ve got Jenna using the bottle opener to take her boots off. Does that sound integrated well enough?”
What’s next?
Wondering what the year has in store? Here’s a handy roadmap!
Get out your map
Here's the general flow of this year's workshop series. You don't have to follow them in order, but you may find that one builds on the next.
About the author:
Christine Hanolsy is a (primarily) science fiction and fantasy writer who simply cannot resist a love story. She joined the YeahWrite team in 2014 as the microstory editor and stepped into the role of Editor-In-Chief in 2020. Christine was a 2015 BlogHer Voices of the Year award recipient and Community Keynote speaker for her YeahWrite essay, “Rights and Privileges.” Her short fiction has been published in a number of anthologies and periodicals and her creative nonfiction at Dead Housekeeping and in the Timberline Review. Outside of YeahWrite, Christine’s past roles have included Russian language scholar, composer, interpreter, and general cat herder. Find her online at christinehanolsy.com.
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
