Writing prompts that work
The handful of habits that separate a usable asset from a near miss.
- Before you start
- Nothing.
- What you end up with
- Fewer wasted runs.
Step by step
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Name the thing first
Start with the subject in plain words — "a rusted iron lantern", "a snow-covered pine forest". Everything else in the sentence modifies that. Prompts that open with mood and never name an object tend to come back as mood with no object.
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Say what it is for
"Game icon", "tileable texture", "character reference sheet", "level backdrop" are the most useful three words you can add. They tell the model about framing, margins and composition all at once, which is usually what people are actually trying to fix when they add more adjectives.
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Describe the light, not the feeling
"Lit from a low sun behind" gives you something. "Epic" and "amazing" give you nothing — they are not visual instructions. If you want atmosphere, describe what is producing it.
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Change one thing at a time
When a result is close, resist rewriting the whole prompt. Change one clause and run it again. If you keep the seed the same, you will see what that clause did rather than getting an unrelated picture.
Worth knowing
- The ✨ Polish button beside the prompt rewrites a short prompt into a fuller one, free. Good for getting unstuck; read what it wrote before you run it, and Undo puts your words back.
- A seed is just a number that makes a run repeatable. Same prompt plus same seed gives you the same picture — that is how you make a set that matches.
- Negative prompts are for removing things that keep turning up uninvited, not for describing what you want.
- For a character you plan to animate later, ask for a full body, a neutral pose and a plain background. That is the frame every downstream tool wants.
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