That writing prompt about a locked room mystery took me 4 hours to crack

I was trying to write a short story from one of those "someone is trapped in a room with a dead body" prompts. I spent 2 hours just mapping out the room layout on grid paper before I realized the door had a deadbolt that could only lock from inside. Then another 2 hours figuring out how the killer could have done it without leaving any fingerprints on the doorknob. Ended up using a piece of fishing line and a carefully placed ice cube method. Has anyone else gotten stuck on a seemingly simple detail in a prompt before?

2 comments

2 Comments

troy_sanchez820d ago

That fishing line and ice cube trick is brilliant honestly, shows how the smallest physical details can totally derail an idea. It's kind of like how I've noticed people overthink simple problems in real life too, like that one guy who spent an hour trying to fix a sticky door hinge before someone handed him a can of WD-40. We all get caught up turning a small puzzle into a massive chore when the answer is usually simpler than we think lol.

danielwhite16d ago

@troy_sanchez8 that WD-40 story hits close to home. I read this article once about how engineers at NASA spent months figuring out why a satellite kept overheating, and it turned out some technician left a piece of tape over a vent. The whole thing could have been caught in five minutes if someone just looked at it the right way. Reminds me of that old saying about how the most obvious answer is usually the right one, but our brains love to dance around it for some reason.