All-Inclusive Promptober - Recap and Behind the Scenes
This was such a thrill to do! Shout out to everyone who took part. I loved seeing your fills! Can't wait to read the rest of them - kind of a personal Nano-read-mo project for me!
I learned a lot over the last month of coming up with scenarios every night. Before it all started, I was thinking that I'd hammer them out in 10-15 minutes each night, and it would be easy-peasy. It turned out to actually take 1-2 hours each night. My hubris got me.
There were two main things about the prompts that I was struggling with getting right.
Trying to be informed enough about the prompt to write scenarios that someone with experience in it might actually use. This was especially true of a lot of the smut/kink prompts that I'm personally not experienced in. I'm super duper ace, so the extent of my knowledge on a lot of these was "X is a thing that exists."
Most of the days started with research: not just learning about the prompt, but also what draws people to it, and what they might like to focus on in their work.
This came with some interesting dilemmas. Potters call the act of shaping a pot on the potter's wheel, "throwing". Should I use that word in the scenarios? On the one hand, "throwing a pot" would sound accurate and authentic to someone who makes pots... but what if someone with no pottery experience might want to write about it? Would they see "throwing a pot" and think that meant throwing it at a wall? (A funny side effect: to this day, Youtube is still showing me pottery videos. Pottery was Oct 8.)
Trying to balance being general with being a bit more unique. For eample, for "Relaxing bath" (Oct 10), I didn't want to simply say "A takes a relaxing bath," "A makes a bath for B," and "A is tired and looking forward to a bath." To be clear, these are all perfectly fine prompts! A work about any of these would be lovely! However, I felt that anyone would look at "relaxing bath" as a prompt, and be able to come up with these plots on their own, and so I wouldn't be giving them any new ideas that they didn't already have.
On the other hand, an idea I had for Pet Play was "the pet is not the usual puppy or kitten, but a Madagascar hissing cockroach!" This had the opposite problem: it's too niche. Probably the person would've never come across this idea before, but would they really want to create a work about it? Maybe not.
In the end I settled into aiming for a more general first scenario, something familiar that most people would feel comfortable with, and then making the third scenario a bit more unusual. The second one could be anything - as long as there was one safe one and one unusual one, that was fine.
Another thing I learned was that LOTS of kinks have their roots in the BDSM community. Pain play, genital warming, cuckolding, power imbalance, age play, exhibitionism, chastity devices... even with something seemingly general, like clothing kink, when I looked it up, lots of people were into leather or latex, and so these discussions were in BDSM spaces.
I'm hoping to be back next year with a whole new list of prompts, and this time, I'll start early! I'll spend the year collecting prompts and scenarios, and hit the ground running come October.
Thanks so much to everyone who was a part of this, and see you next year!
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
areudirty
theartofmadeline
origamiaround
stormborns