# Prompt library

> Four complete prompts — a Top 10, a story, an explainer and a countdown — written to be copied and adapted.

Source: https://docs.kutly.io/writing/prompt-library/

Four prompts, one per genre, each naming its subject in the first clause and
putting the direction after it.

Copy the one closest to the video you want, replace the subject, and leave the
shape where it is. All of it goes in the input box in **Idea**, which takes
up to 2,000 characters.

The genre names describe the shape of the writing. Nothing on the screen picks
one, and nothing the screen sends carries one: the shape is in the words you
type.

Every prompt below was run through the check that classifies a topic before any
of the paid work starts. Every one was accepted.
[Idea](https://docs.kutly.io/writing/idea/) explains that check and the rule these prompts are built
on.

## Listicle / Top 10

```text
Seven bridges that failed for reasons their own engineers had already written down. Give each bridge its own beat: the warning on paper, who read it, and what the collapse cost. Order them by how long the warning sat unanswered, longest first. Plain engineering language, no dramatised collapse. Close on a warning that is still unanswered.
```

It fixes a count, then gives every item on the list the same three things to
carry. **Top 5**, **Top 10** and **Top 20** are this shape.

Swap the subject and the three things. The count belongs in the first clause
with the subject — the number is part of what you are naming, not a setting you
pick.

Naming the count is all this prompt does about it: Kutly chooses the seven
bridges. Name the items yourself instead and it works from your list — the topic
is the whole brief, and 2,000 characters is room for ten of them with a line
each.

> **Caution — Counted lists are in beta**
>
> They work, and the count is not enforced — a **Top 10** is the shape you asked
> for rather than a number you are promised. When the script has to be exactly
> yours, write it and bring it to [Voiceover](https://docs.kutly.io/writing/voiceover/).

## Narrative story

```text
The Great Smog of London, December 1952, told as five days inside one hospital. Follow the people who counted the admissions rather than the ministers who explained them. Open on the morning the light turned brown and stop before the Clean Air Act, then give the Act one closing line. Unhurried, past tense, no invented dialogue.
```

It names one event, one vantage point inside it, and the two moments the film
opens and stops on.

Swap the event and the vantage point. Keep the two boundaries — the moment it
opens on and the moment it stops before — because they are what makes the prompt
name a span rather than a subject.

## Explainer

```text
Why concrete keeps getting stronger for decades after it is poured. Answer one question — what is still happening inside a slab ten years on — and answer it in order: what goes into the mix, what the water does, and what is left unreacted. Assume the viewer has mixed a bag of it and knows nothing else. Leave out the history of cement and leave out the emissions argument. Ordinary words for every compound you name.
```

It asks one question, fixes the order the answer arrives in, and states what the
viewer is assumed to know already.

Swap the question, the steps of the answer and the assumption. The two
exclusions name what cement drags in — its own history, and the emissions
argument. Swap them for what your subject drags in, or drop them if it drags in
nothing.

## Countdown / ranked to number one

```text
The ten worst postings in the history of lighthouse keeping, counted down by how long the average keeper lasted before requesting a transfer. Name the station and the figure before anything else in each entry. Work from ten up to one so the shortest posting lands last, and give the last three entries twice the time of the first seven. Dry and factual, no ghost stories.
```

It names the rule the ranking is made on as well as the rank, and says which
end the count finishes at. A **Top 10** that ends on number one is this shape
rather than the listicle, and the beta note above covers it too.

Swap the subject and the ranking rule. The rule has to stay in the same sentence
as the count, and so does the line that says which way the count runs.