Prompt Fic

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

1. Inform

The troper described the trope, in which a type of Fan Fiction is produced.

2. Substance

The fanfic type usually consists of short, numbered "fills" in response to similarly numbered prompts, sometimes suggested by other authors. Usually of Drabble length, but sometimes as short as one sentence. Usually issued as answers for a "Prompt table" or a "bingo/theme challenge", from where the style of this article is created, based in the common way they were written.

Most "prompt fic" nowadays, however, are ordinary fics written as result of various types of challenges, ranging from competitions and exchanges to answers to blogs specifically generating situations that any enterprising fanauthors can adopt, and merely tagged accordingly to differentiate from fics written for more conventional reasons. As a rule, it's similar to the phenomenon of "inspiration" communities for writers in general.

3. Guide

The prompts themselves are usually the most general nouns as possible, such as "love", "kiss" "burn", and are not really connected to each other. "Tables" types of prompts tend to be themed but that's not seen as obligatory. More elaborate challenges have list of things and situations that must be included in the story.

4. Love

Since Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls, the prompts usually describe various aspects of the relationship of two characters within a fandom. Not unsurprisingly, the biggest generator of prompt fics tend to be Kink Memes, usually in the form of "five times a character did this thing, and the one time they didn't".

5. Clash

Sometimes several writers will share the same set of prompts and compete with each other, or simply apply the prompts to all their favorite fandoms.

Examples of Prompt Fic include:

Fandom in General

Anime and Manga

Film

Literature

  • Draco's inclusion into the core cast of the Dangerverse Harry Potter fic cycle was allegedly due to a prompt-style suggestion.