Pocket Prompt Expansion: Something Explodes #1 – Literal Explosions

One of the first cards I decided upon for the first deck of Pocket Prompts was ‘Something explodes’. It’s bold, dramatic, and can stir a story.

In this series of posts, I’m going to show you how this one card can be used to tell many different types of stories, and affect much more change than you might imagine.

Creative thinking is all about asking the right questions. We’ll address many more of the specifics for an explosion as the month progresses, but for now: will you take the prompt literally, or metaphorically?

If it’s a literal explosion, you then have a number of other questions to deal with:

• Is there fire?
• Is it an underwater explosion?
• Is the explosion a result of a bomb or just a change in pressure?
• Could it be natural?
• What sort of consequences are there to a literal explosion?

Some genres don’t loan themselves well to literal explosions, and that’s okay. There’s plenty more to come with just this card.