We get a lot of questions about prompts, so I thought this might be a helpful post for how to break down a Whumptober prompt and get ideas.
Each day of Whumptober has 4 prompts: a theme trope, then three ideas. You can use any one, two, three, or all four in your work. Each day’s prompts loosely relate to each other but could also be taken individually. They can be interpreted as literally or figuratively as you want.
Let’s look at an example. I’m a writer, so I’m going to talk in terms of storywriting, but just remember that this challenge is open to all sorts of creative works, including art, gifsets, headcannons, crafts, or whatever else you can think of.
ICARUS
cage | “You'll say you'd never let me fall from hopes so high” | crash landing
(Fiona Apple, Never is a Promise)
So the theme is Icarus, with additional prompts of a place, a song lyric, and a situation. Taken together, you could write a story of Icarus, who was caged with his father Daedelus, flew too close to the sun on the hope of freedom, and crashed fatally to earth. But you could also look at each prompt in isolation for ideas.
Icarus:
themes of hubris
themes of freedom from captivity
winged characters
a child trying to prove themselves to a parent figure and failing
Cage:
being literally caged
feeling figuratively caged
breaking free of something (literal or figurative)
themes of imprisonment and freedom or false freedom
“You'll say you'd never let me fall from hopes so high”:
regret
promises made or broken
an accident and its aftermath
bitterness after betrayal
guilt after betrayal or accident
Crash landing:
literally falling from a height
being high (drugs, mania, medications, love, sugar) and crashing
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but just some brainstorming ideas I could come up with quickly. In a few of my fandoms, I could write about Bucky’s fall from the train and Steve’s guilt (MCU), Basch fon Ronsenburg’s fall from grace or languishing in a cage for treason (FFXII), Sephiroth summoning Meteor (FFVII), Chell being dragged back into Aperture after thinking she’s free (Portal), a dragonrider battle (ASOIAF/HoD), crashing into the Chionthar after victory (BG3), Geralt coming down after battle when the potions wear off (The Witcher). Any of these scenarios could be inspired by one or more of the four prompts for that day – my problem is always deciding which one I want to use!
“But Yenn,” you say, “what if I can’t think of anything for any parts of the prompt, or I don’t like the prompts, or they’re too much for me in some way?” No problem! We also have a list of 15 alternatives that can be substituted for any day (once per prompt). If you’re still stuck, you can always come on Discord and ask for brainstorming help. Everyone is super nice there, especially for a community of people that live to put blorbos in discomfort.
I hope this post helps give people ideas. We’re working hard to get everything together and should release the prompts in a couple of weeks! In the meantime, our 2024 playlist will be loading soon...
I just saw the ask someone sent saying that ‘rumi is not going to have a good time this October’ and your response of not knowing who rumi is. And I must tell you as a bookkeeper my first thought was rumi like the 13th century poet and the idea that there’s whump of rumi the 13th century poet is hilarious to me
I also thought of Rumi the Persian poet and I was so confused, but figured there's a fandom for everything! (I figured out Rumi is a Kpop Demon Hunter character, don't at me, friends 😄)
One wants the mod team to take their time making the promptlist both to reduce stress and improve quality - and is obviously the Correct wolf to listen to
But man. The other wolf *really* wants to tear into some blorbos like. *Right now*
Looking forward to the end of the month, can't wait to start! And thank you mods for your hard work!
Well, it's a good thing several of the mods are dog people and support your wolves, because we all spent three long hours today on a cross-timezone conference call working on the prompts list! We need some more time to finalize it, but we should have the playlist up next week so you can start guessing and get yourself in the mood! Feed those wolves some blorbos...
people panicking about only having a few days ready.... people having all of them done........ and then there's me, day 1, not a word written, effectively rawdogging the event 😭
This is more a question for the people who follow this blog than for the mods (although I'd love to hear the mods' perspectives if they also participate), but please tell me I'm not the only one who occasionally shoehorns story ideas into a prompt instead of coming up with brand-new ideas based on the prompts. Sometimes I have a really hard time with a day's prompts and/or a story I really want to write that doesn't fit anything super well but could *kinda* work for a certain prompt.
This is literally how I'm approaching the challenge this year. I write what I want to write and match it up to prompts at the end. Otherwise I get paralyzed by all my ideas 😂
