this is all because I have been thinking about @zedecksiew 's excellent dungeon23 post here: https://cohost.org/zedecksiew/post/793282-sweet-joy-sung - specifically how the whole thing grows out of one 8-word sentence ( " The image I began with this week was: “A woman has loud sex with a ship.” ) that has got so much happening already.
As the starting point for a few rooms or a location this seems way more exciting to me than the prompt lists that are all one word like darkness or revenge or fountains. What if instead of starting from a very big idea and writing details you start in a small little box and see how much life you can wring out of it? what if yesterday golden hair clogged the drain in every fountain in the abbey? what if a turtle is dragging a box of nails across the tiles? ( i don't think these are great or anything and alas probably the real trick here is to be an excellent writer who has real good ideas)
I think this is a bit like the way Perec's Life a User's Manual system works (before I read this book I thought it was going to be very cold & clever, because of all the rules, but instead it is this dizzying experience of looking into small spaces and watching them open up like flowers ) The list of prompts that he used is made up of mostly the small specific kinds of things one could find in apartment rooms, like List of Small Furniture: pendulums, ashtrays, chandeliers, mobile sculptures, mirrors, pianos. Or Animals: cat, dog, bird, rat, fly, bees. But each room he writes about gets like 40 of these. ( you can see a room list on this lovely website but it is in french http://escarbille.free.fr/vme/?chap=43 ) so in the end you are completely hemmed in and what you get out of that, I think, can be so much more interesting than having an open field. (At least it is more interesting if georges perec is in there writing about it)
(This is also something I love about illustrating other people's work: They have built me all these constraints of texts to push up against & see what happens. I am always trying to see where there is room for for me to add some stuff of my own without getting in the way of what's already there, like how can I add more detail & life to this while still being faithful to the author's intent? )
Maybe i could make a system of dungeon constraints by grabbing every prompt list at I can find and using them all at once? (this is probably a terrible idea but my plan for dungeon23 is try out lots of terrible ideas)
