Welcome to the first (unofficial) Bad Writing Prompt day of the Beehaw Writing instance!
I’ve been reading a bit on the instance, and I agree with the consensus that we’re going to need something weekly to bring and keep a community together. So I’m doing my part!
Wait, what do you mean by bad writing prompts? Partially inspired by this post here.
“Don’t try to prove you’re a good writer, you’ll never write anything. Try to prove you’re a bad writer and you’ll write everything.”
So, here’s my general idea. For now, I’ll be posting 3 different things.
- Bad Character Ideas
- Bad Setting Ideas
- Bad Plot Ideas
For you to mix, match and use as you please! Again, I’m writing this off the cuff and with 20 minutes before work, so apologies for the short post, but without any more delay, here’s what I got for you all!
Bad Character Ideas
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The disgruntled younger sibling of the “Chosen One”
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A food critic who actually suffers from no sense of taste, getting by on charisma and faking it alone
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A magical anime girl who has a strange hobby and obsession with taxidermy (Thanks to my coworker for giving me this one haha)
Bad Setting Ideas
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Cowboys and digimon. How that works I have no clue. Just. Cowboys and digimon combined. If you do this you have my eternal gratitude.
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Told entirely through the lens of the endless blurb you skip before a recipe.
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An office building set within purgatory itself.
Bad Plot Ideas
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The main character has traveled back in time to kill Hitler. Little do they know is Hitler is now a skilled killer of time travelers.
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A love story where two people are fated to be with one other, lest the world end. They hate each other.
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A heist on the Vatican vault.
Alright, I’m running out of time, and need to skip off to work. Hope to see some posts, and remember to make it awful. I want some real schlock and cringe. Feel free to use all of the prompts, or none of them! Your reward will be nothing. Ciao ciao!
What do you mean by bad idea?! this is a great idea! Admittedly you are aiming for a comedy of some sort, or a subversion of Fate, or are otherwise deliberately flipping a trope, but this makes a great idea for a potentially interesting character point of view. Same with the Taxidermy-obsessed medical girl. I want to read a story about a goth magical girl now, I’m already sold.
Well, Jim Butcher already did The Lost Roman Legion and Pokemon (the series is called Alera), I don’t see why this couldn’t work.
And aren’t all office buildings already an extension of purgatory? ;)
The love story feels too much like some bad anime tropes, I wouldn’t want to read that. A heist on the Vatican vault on the other hand, that sounds interesting.
That’s the ones that provoke some thought in me.
And if no one writes about the goth magical girl, I might do it myself.
Uh, easy, goth magical girl who is also a cowboy with digimon pulling a heist on the Vatican vault (which is also a train in this universe). Duh.
Adding on- I believe you could make the “have to be married but hate one another” trope well if you made both the characters as adults. It’d be a nice way to wrestle with the themes of what we have to give up as individuals for the world around us. Though the trope itself seems more commonly used as an “enemies to lovers” thing, which can have it’s place (if very much overdone at this point).
Hate to love is the harder sell generally, unless the hate is built on misunderstandings. But that’s sort of been overdone too.
My serial starts off with a circumstantial convenient marriage rather than love, but at least it kicks off with everyone trying to make it work.
Honestly, I was going to try and trope-flip some of the Harem sub-tropes, but I found that just having three people was enough and nixed the idea of adding more romances to the group.