My writing prompt idea got killed by a rogue seagull at the Santa Monica pier

I was sitting there last Saturday trying to come up with a good prompt about time travel and a vintage typewriter. This seagull swooped down and stole my notebook right off the bench. It dropped it three feet away but the pages were all wet and covered in bird droppings. I tried to salvage the idea but my brain was just stuck on the image of that dumb bird. Now I write all my prompt ideas in the notes app on my phone like a normal person. Has anyone else had a random outdoor distraction completely ruin a creative idea before?

2 comments

2 Comments

caleb_stone1d agoMost Upvoted

44th and Spruce in Philly I had the same thing happen but with a pigeon and a half-eaten soft pretzel. I learned my lesson after trying to rewrite my lost prompt from memory, it came out sterile and boring. Now I always type rough ideas into my phone notes as they come, specifically in a locked "vomit draft" folder so I don't even judge the quality. The bird did you a favor honestly, because now you've got a ridiculous story to tell instead of some generic time travel plot that's been done a thousand times

the_piper1d ago

Wait, has anyone considered that the seagull might have actually been trying to help? Like maybe it knew you were gonna write something cheesy about time travel and steered you toward something way funnier. A prompt about a time-traveling typewriter that keeps getting stolen by seagulls across different eras actually sounds better than whatever you had before. Plus now you've got a villain for your story that's way more memorable than some dusty machine. That bird basically wrote your next big idea for you, you just gotta look past the poop.