Burned 3 hours on a 6 word prompt because I kept picking the "right" word

Terry Dixon · 2026-10-24T22:30:05.237548+00:00

Last Tuesday I sat down to write a flash piece from a prompt that was just "write about a locked door" and I told myself it would take 20 minutes. Three hours later I had 200 words and had rewritten the first line 14 times because I kept chasing a better word for "cold." What finally got me out was a dumb trick: I set a kitchen timer for 5 minutes and told myself whatever was on the page when it beeped was the draft, done, no edits. First try the piece was bad but it was finished, and then I spent 30 minutes cleaning it up instead of 3 hours freezing. I used to think the prompt was the problem, that vague prompts give you nothing to grab, but now I think vague prompts are fine and it is the polishing while drafting that kills me. The locked door piece ended up being about a guy who loses his keys in a hotel in Billings and refuses to ask the front desk for help, and it only happened because I stopped auditioning verbs. Curious what time limits other people use on flash prompts, do you do 10 minutes or shorter, and does it ever go in the piece or just the trash?

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Burned 3 hours on a 6 word prompt because I kept picking the "right" word | Creative Writing Prompts - Librear