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

Collector Warmup
Take a walk around the space you’re in, or the space just outside it. Collect three objects; either carry them to your desk or take sketches or pics to carry them that way.
Imagine these objects are the holdings of a special collection. Conjure a figure who is in some way the keeper of this collection.
Set a timer for 5 minutes and let that figure tell the story of their acquisition.
When you’re done writing, note anything of interest or curiosity that you might want to port forward, as an object, into your day’s writing. Re object: could be an actual object, but could be a thought object too (the idea of ___). Throw the rest away.
If you want more, make a list of ten scenarios in which that object could appear.

Triplets
In a column down your page, write triplets in the form: ___ly ___ing ____s
For example, wildly oscillating notes or blankly farting genies.
Take the words that come to mind and don’t worry about sense. Try listening for the sound of the word as it approaches your imagination.
Set a timer for 2 minutes and write as many as you can. If you get stuck, push the words out through sonority alone, using “cl” or “sh” or “gr” or “w” as initial sounds. claustrophobically shallowing growls.
tuning excercise

walking inventory
Take a walk. It can be around the room, your apartment, your house, your neighborhood. Find at least ten details you’ve never noticed before. Make an inventory.

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

Beacons and Guides
Make a short list of people whose entrances into your life showed you something new you could do or become, something that changed the path you were on in some way. Choose one and do a memory recall exercise, trying to bring yourself back into the scene of an early encounter with that person. Use sensory detail and panorama to drive your recall. Try doing the recall in a scatter on or around a page, rather than written out continuously.
Read over your recall of this scene, and distill the encounter into a few gestures one person makes to another: ways or relating, showing, or inviting, perhaps. Save these gestures for use in a totally different piece of writing, or if you are in the mood to stay with memory, write the scene with a focus on these gestures: scene as a dance of gestures.