ONC Journal 2022

Prompts - Recognizing and Utilizing (1/11/22)

"The new kid is bullied relentlessly until they discover they actually have a quite unique and unexpected talent."

Cue the stories where the character isn't bullied, but the writer wants the reader to believe they were. It's very similar to the princess prompt, in that I suspect the stories which went awry were ones written by younger writers whose concept of having something bad happen to you really isn't that bad. Yet, in this same regard the judges aren't going to nix a story during the first round for this kind of issue. Why? Because many of the judges are aware that this is a learning issue for young writers and they also know the young writer is honestly trying. Still, if you are a young writer wanting to get far - particularly past the second round and maybe onto the long list, be aware of biases in your writing created by lack of knowledge regarding how the world works based on your age.

"'The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.' - Albert Einstein."

As I've mentioned, simply quoting the quote doesn't work. Unless of course it is relevant to the plot. This is one of those quotes which could actually be quoted by a character as sage advice at the beginning of a work and then the rest of the story tie into the character who was given said advice learning what the person was trying to tell them. Except, that's not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about was how the year this prompt was out, I actually came across a story which didn't quote the quote, nor did it tie into the quote. Sage advice directly related to the quote is one way to interpret the quote, but another is to focus on the concept of time, which is what most people did. That one story - nothing to do with time, and nothing to do with an overly chaotic life, though perhaps like the princess prompt and the kid who was bullied relentlessly, the write thought the life of their character was overly chaotic when it wasn't.

"A freak storm creates a power surge, and you wake up in an unknown world with only a sword, a shield, and a time limit."

This is actually quite similar to a prompt from last year as both involved a freak storm causing a power surge as what leads into the storyline. Yes, that freak storm was important to both prompts, so nixing it wouldn't work. So wouldn't nixing that time limit mentioned at the end, because its things like that which set certain prompts apart from each other, such as the one I've mentioned that was from last year.

"Yeah, that's right, son. Zombies used to be a thing."

Would just any zombie story do for this prompt? I think some thought that at first glance, but the key element here is the "used to be", something which ended left out of quite a few stories. The other issue was how straight forward the prompt was. By this I mean it was easy to incorporate into the first 2k with a very high success rate, but because of that world building for the rest of the story became super important and quite a few stories which passed the first round fell through on the world building.

"You were tasked by the Paranormal Council to solve the conflict between the Montagues, an old clan of werewolves and the Capulets, an ancient vampire family."

This is actually my go to when I gave an example of what not to do with a prompt. Effectively, this is the kind of prompt say someone who has an idea for writing about vampires might see and go, "oh, I'll just file it under this prompt for submission and have at it" completely missing the fact it's not actually the vampires that are the important part of the prompt. In fact, you could substitute vampires and werewolves for any supernatural creature and you didn't have to keep the names of the clans either. The real goal was to write a paranormal Romeo and Juliet storyline that an outsider was tasked with resolving, and whether it ended the same as Shakesperes was completely up to you.