
LOTTERY
A randomly selected pool of prompts for you. Refresh the page to get a new pool.
WARMUP

Conversions
Make a list of 100 objects in your immediate environment. They should all be nouns, though your nouns might come with their own adjectives.
Then select a subset of these words (maybe 20) and convert them to infinitive verbs by simply rewriting them with the word “to” in front of them.
Then select a subset of these infinitives (maybe 10) and convert them to gerunds (-ing).
Finally select a subset (maybe 4) of those gerunds and put them into a sentence form that looks either like this:
[name] is [gerund] with a [leftover noun from your first list].
or like this
[name] is [gerund] the [leftover noun from your first list].

Minute Lists (2)
Come up with four or five minute lists * or use the set offered here. If you’re making your own set, try to balance out specialized vocabulary (e.g. words pertaining to baking), names (real or invented), sound approaches (e.g. words starting with CH). Here are a few offerings for today to take or leave: names of childhood friends, words for types of transformation, words beginning with L, names of mountains.
* 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.
tuning excercise

Circumference Tuner
Wherever you’ve chosen to write, take a few scans around your circumference. Look at what surrounds you. Make a small map of that circumference of your writing space, noting resources, suggestions, aspirations, pleasures, and tools.
Then, after you’ve made your map, gently freewrite for five minutes or one full page, asking yourself questions about the things you’ve provided yourself with: how can you use them as you write today, whether for clarity, injunction, solance, energy, or something else? How does your space tell you something about what threads you want to follow as you write, or what discipline you want to ask of yourself?

Something from the Empty
There’s a song by Dan Melchior* that goes isn’t it empty sometimes / isn’t it empty sometimes? / you gotta try and make some thing out of the emptiness.
What’s a way to think about emptiness that doesn’t bog down with bad implications? What’s a way to attend with curiosity to some kind of emptiness that is an occasional or even a steady presence in your life? A dropping-away of obligations or relations that once were there. Or maybe an emptiness you perceive somewhere adjacent to your life. An empty parking lot you pass, an emptiness in a certain kind of rote transaction or professional hoohaw you have to occasionally perform.
Choose a specific emptiness that interests you.
What would making some thing out of this emptiness entail?
As preparation for this tuning exercise, sketch, in words or in drawing, the map of this empty zone.
Then write in a notebook, for five or ten minutes, tuning yourself toward what kinds of making and what kinds of things you could make out of this emptiness. What would matter to you as you turned empty into something? What is the emotional, relational substance of the way you would approach this hypothetical creation?
You might think of it as a kind of repair, a restart, a gift, a ceremony, an acknowledgment. Or you might think of it with a little more wildness, a kind of decreation of decreation, an undoing that becomes a doing, an act of negation that turns a negative charge to positive. An act of presence or insistence.
Read over what you’ve written about your hypothetical emptiness conversion. Look for tasks or assignments or reminders — about what matters and how you want your making to be — that you can port into your writing day. Write some of these tasks down on an index card or post-it you can put in view of your writing space, so you can occasionally, cyclically remind yourself of these tasks while you’re working. Maybe the reminder will create a space to follow a different impulse or invitation than you’re accustomed to. Or maybe it will lend you a useful commitment.
Optional add-on: trawl your writing and turn it into a song. Borrow an old tune or trope. Embrace repetition. Play dress-up if you feel like it and write in the style of one of your heroes. Now you have something to hum as you write.
*The song is Bureau of Neurotic Grins.
generator

color & temperature
Choose a color and a temperature. Scan your memory for a moment in your life that matched that temperature and whose light or environment held that color. Set a 4-minute timer and on a single page, record sensory details from the scene. Don’t write in paragraphs, use lists or just write indiscriminately in fragments anywhere on the page.
Then take the details of that scene as you’ve surfaced them and give them to another voice. Let it be their fantasy or their nightmare. Let them tell the story to another, third person, who might occasionally weigh in with opinions. Write it in script form.

new room with old images
(for a project in progress)
Choose a set of images from a larger scatter of images, perhaps drawn from accumulated warmups left behind in your notebooks, or from inside a piece of your own writing. Allow two or three images to get near each other in your mind’s eye. What energy is there? What forces of attraction or repulsion?
Now consider your writing as a building with many rooms. Find a new room in your writing that can house that constellation of two or three images. Hide them in the room however you wish. Make them major or minor. Reveal them if you wish. Animate them if you wish. Try to honor the energy you sensed in their combination. If your constellation feels too random, then repeat the first visualizing section of the prompt with deliberately chosen images until you find a combination that interests and surprises you.
Alternately, more secretly, take the energy you found between your images and see if you can take an existing scene or passage, perhaps even wherever you left off last time you wrote, and propel it into a transitional zone so it can take on this other energy.