Prompts in a challenge-style game: A story must recognizably incorporate or react to the chosen prompt -- that is, a reasonable reader must be able to find the prompt's influence in the story. A writer may choose to do the exact opposite of the prompt in overt reaction to it, or make the prompt a story within the story, or a single scene or red herring, or any number of things that subvert or invert the prompt, in addition to addressing it in the more usual straightforwardly expected way. Writers are not expected to try to fulfill the wishes or intentions of the person who submitted the prompt! Getting out of that fraught space is part of why we stopped doing exchanges.
Think of it like the old N&Npack Christmas challenges of 3 things to incorporate into a story; as long as you fit in, say, the sled, the cocoa, and the snowglobe in any way at all -- well, any pro-N&N way, of course :-) -- you'd satisfactorily fulfilled their challenge; you could put all three things into a TV commercial the characters saw at the airport on their way to Hawaii, if you wanted to. You didn't have to build your plot closely around the challenge elements, though you could if you wanted to, and most of them usually did.
To successfully transpose "dead body at a house party" to a Greyhound bus trip, perhaps one would want to make one of the characters say a line of dialogue to make the transfer pointed for readers to recognize...? "This is just like that house party I read about in that Agatha Christie novel" would do it, I imagine...?
House parties: Not at all important, but my understanding of the breadth of the term "house party" seems perhaps out of alignment with yours...? My understanding of the term runs through, in addition to, of course, the house parties in Agatha Christie novels, also those in Jane Austen's novels, Rex Stout novels, and all the way back to Boccaccio's Decameron, plus the series of "House Party" movies that started in the '90s and ran into the '00s, and, well, here's a Google news search of recent news articles containing the term "house party," with headlines from "Lincoln Police make arrest in house party homicide" to "My neighbour invited the whole street to a house party except me." In recent years, young people have taken to renting out AirB&Bs and holding very destructive house parties in them; I'm pretty sure young people have been doing that forever, just in varied ways by era, class, and location.
Brainstorming: Most brainstormed ideas do not make the final cut. :-) I did not mean in any way to imply that all of these are worth using. My apologies for any misunderstanding.
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Think of it like the old N&Npack Christmas challenges of 3 things to incorporate into a story; as long as you fit in, say, the sled, the cocoa, and the snowglobe in any way at all -- well, any pro-N&N way, of course :-) -- you'd satisfactorily fulfilled their challenge; you could put all three things into a TV commercial the characters saw at the airport on their way to Hawaii, if you wanted to. You didn't have to build your plot closely around the challenge elements, though you could if you wanted to, and most of them usually did.
To successfully transpose "dead body at a house party" to a Greyhound bus trip, perhaps one would want to make one of the characters say a line of dialogue to make the transfer pointed for readers to recognize...? "This is just like that house party I read about in that Agatha Christie novel" would do it, I imagine...?
House parties: Not at all important, but my understanding of the breadth of the term "house party" seems perhaps out of alignment with yours...? My understanding of the term runs through, in addition to, of course, the house parties in Agatha Christie novels, also those in Jane Austen's novels, Rex Stout novels, and all the way back to Boccaccio's Decameron, plus the series of "House Party" movies that started in the '90s and ran into the '00s, and, well, here's a Google news search of recent news articles containing the term "house party," with headlines from "Lincoln Police make arrest in house party homicide" to "My neighbour invited the whole street to a house party except me." In recent years, young people have taken to renting out AirB&Bs and holding very destructive house parties in them; I'm pretty sure young people have been doing that forever, just in varied ways by era, class, and location.
Brainstorming: Most brainstormed ideas do not make the final cut. :-) I did not mean in any way to imply that all of these are worth using. My apologies for any misunderstanding.