LOTTERY
A randomly selected pool of prompts for you. Refresh the page to get a new pool.
WARMUP
minute list trawl
Do four minute-lists* of your own choosing. Go back through them with a second color pen and circle any words that please you.
* MINUTE LISTS are a language brain warmup. For each list item, set the timer for one minute and write as many words as you can think of in that item’s category. Write at speed and take anything that comes to mind, even if the words popping up are incorrect matches or not real words. The speed and free-for-all ethos are aimed at getting your vocabulary moving.
observational spill
Do an observation warmup, describing the room you are in with microscopic attention. Use only a single sentence piled and spilling over with clauses. Try to cover an entire page in this one hyper-attentive clause-proliferating sentence.
tuning excercise
sounding line
Imagine your writing can work like a sounding line, going from a surface to a depth and back up again. You can think of that surface-depth span as a time sample, sounding from the present to the deep past, or some other kind of depth: light thoughts to heavy, public to private. Write one full page which traverses an account of your own thinking, moving from a surface to a depth and back to the surface of whatever pond you’ve chosen, attempting to fathom the deepest part at the exact midpoint of the page.
Your houses
A tuning exercise for thinking about story spaces you hold in memory.
Think of the houses that leave an imprint on your life, perhaps your early life or an intense time of growth in your life. Is there one whose features have left a trace in your imagination, whether it shows up in some distorted or partial way in your dreams, or floats to mind occasionally, or whose atmosphere saturates a strong memory?
Make a list of three or four buildings that have stayed with you in this way, and choose the one that seems the most resonant.
This tuning exercise moves via lists and mini-freewrites.
List the architectural features of this house (or other building) in the order they come to mind. See if you can fill a column all the way down a page. Put yourself into this building in your mind’s eye. Move up and down its halls, its stairs, a memory scan to recuperate lost details.
Select a subset of five or six items from your list. Include some elements that you had already marked about this house, that are right there at the foreground in your memory, but also things that only surfaced through the act of extending your list.
Then for each item in your subset, set a timer and write for one minute, flooding the page with whatever language comes to mind—detailed description, associative mood words, particular memories, anything else.
If you want to expand your subset and write more, do so.
Otherwise, read over the mini freewrites with an eye toward the type of narrative space they evoke.
Make one final list, mining your freewrites for:
— possible spaces for a story to exist in;
— possible features of a space that might offer a path into some kind of transition in a story, where an appearance gives way to a new unfolding direction for the story to move in.
As you write this final list, allow yourself both to borrow very literally and to extrapolate abstractly from your house and its print in your memory.
generator
Repeat with Drift
Write a one-paragraph or one-page scene. To write that scene, play a simple connect-the-dots game with words circled from prior warmups. Go trawling through your notebooks with a pen of a second color, or if you have nothing on hand, do a quick set of minute lists, select words from there, and weave them into a your scene.
Then rewrite the paragraph (or page), starting with the same first few words but allowing the details, imagery, and action drift just a little. Reweave the scene at a slant, so it becomes a slightly different scene.
Repeat as many times as you like. Let each new iteration make space for something new and true to appear in the scene.
Something Hidden
Browse magazines or art books or do image searches looking for crowded, interesting spaces. When you find an image that appeals to you, study the scene. Where could something be hiding in this scene? Write a scene of exactly one page, set inside the scene of your image, wherein that something is coaxed out of hiding.