Found out my 3 year old prompt file was full of junk I copied from a subreddit and never read
Three years back I started a Google Doc called prompt ideas and dumped every writing prompt I saw into it without reading any of them. Last month I finally opened the thing to pull something for my Tuesday night group and half of it was garbage. Some entries were just single words like barn and rain, no setup at all, and about 40 of them were the same 'describe a room using only smells' prompt copied from different threads. I spent two hours sorting through 300 lines and kept maybe 25 that were worth using. The real problem was that I thought collecting prompts meant I was doing the work, but stockpiling them without testing anything just gave me a folder full of stuff that never fit the room. Now I keep a short list of 15 that I have run at least once with real people in Portland, and I rewrite the shaky ones after every session. Does anyone else hoard prompts like this, or do you only keep the ones you have already tried out loud?