Whoops.

[eponymous_rose]

So my Yuletide signup might just take forever this year. I'm terrible at coming up with prompts - I always want to come up with something particularly awesome and it doesn't help that my mind invariably goes blank when you put an empty form in front of it. And when I do finally come up with a viable prompt, I go "Hmmm, well, actually..." and write 5,000 words of fic for it. Apparently. So far there's just the one time, but it might become a habit.

Discuss! How do you awesome people come up with prompts for ficathons? Do you plan them out beforehand, or are you seized by inspiration at the last minute? And, on a related note, what do you like seeing in a ficathon prompt? Have you ever been stuck with too much detail, or too little?

Comments

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

Personally I like flexible prompts - if they're too specific, I may find myself struggling...

[hoshinekoyasha.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia has a random entry feature. I keep pressing that until something interesting pops up. (or two random dictionary words)

[flo-nelja.livejournal.com]

I have a very long, always ready, list of "things to ask at ficathons".
Featuring all the story ideas I thought "would be so cool !" when I entered one of my current fandoms, but never found, and never wrote. Or the ones where I indeed know a few fics, but I can never read enough different takes on it. ^^

I was always lucky with the level of detail of my ficathon prompts.

[amaresu]

I tend to prompt for open ended situations that I'd like to see. Like one of my Yuletide prompts is for Brimstone and it's basically 'I'd like to see something from Max's pov. Maybe her thoughts on Zeke? What he does or her interactions with him. I am okay with Zeke/Lucifer' and I think that probably gives the person enough to run with while still offering some direction.

Basically I prompt like I like to recieve prompts.

[paranoidangel]

Sometimes I'll think about mine for a while beforehand, sometimes it'll come to me once I start the sign-up, sometimes reading other people's will make me think of something.

As amaresu, I prompt like I like to receive. So for example, I hate getting one word, so I'll never just give a one word prompt. I tend to give a sort of theme/setting I want it set around and then it's up to the writer what sort of thing to write - although in Yuletide you can give details in your Dear Yuletide Writer about what sort of thing you like.

In the tardis gen ficathon my writer said they liked my prompt - which basically said I wanted something about Harry & shoes, gave a few examples and mentioned some stuff I really didn't want it to involve. So I tend to try and prompt like that.

[kindkit.livejournal.com]

I think thefourthvine's post on prompts is full of very good advice.

ETA: With the caveat that I think it's a good idea not to address one's writer as "Santa," since many people participating in Yuletide don't do the Christmas thing.

[stunt-muppet.livejournal.com]

The ideas I use for prompts are generally ideas that I'd like to write myself but haven't the time/inclination/likelihood of ever finishing - things that, ideally, I would already have written. But you're a much more productive writer than I am, so that might not work for you.

As such, I normally have a list of prompts set aside, except it's more like a list of things I want to write or have written fragments of that can be repurposed as prompts.

So far as Yuletide goes, the advice I hear most often is to keep things open-ended and not too specific, because otherwise your gift-giver either has very little room to give the story their own spin or will be more inclined to not follow the prompts. Granted, I'm not sure how I did in that regard, but it's what I hear most often.