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

Minute Lists (10)
Choose five minute lists of your own or use these: parts of a body in action (i.e. a finger curling, a liver filtering); plants with whom your body has an affinity; animals with whom your body has an affinity; words of five letters; names for new brands of socks.
*Minute Lists are a language brain warmup. Choose four or five lists, and for each, set a one-minute timer and write as many words as belong to that list as come to mind, writing at speed without pausing. Restart the timer immediately and move on to the next list. Although the list presents a rule, accept any word that your brain surfaces, even if it is a false match or a made-up word. The speed and free-for-all ethos are aimed at getting your vocabulary moving for a writing session ahead, but minute lists can also be a little like panning for gold, surfacing shiny things—names, objects, expressions—that you might want to use. I occasionally trawl my lists, circling pleasing words with a pen of a second color for easy retrieval later.

OEDelighter
If you have access to the Oxford English Dictionary, whether in giant print or online database (check with your library), choose a word to look up. Spend time reading aloud every one of its senses and earliest instances in print. Then write ten sentences delighting in that word’s older and weirder senses or spellings. Let your word sit in the sentence the way a gem sits in a ring.
(The OED is going to have much more volume of early instances than anywhere else, but if you don’t have OED access, use an etymological dictionary or read the etymology of a word on Merriam-Webster’s site or similar.)
tuning excercise

Your Languages
Use an exploratory writing session to reflect on the languages you were born into and the languages into which you moved yourself.
These may be spoken languages with formal names. They may be languages which were yours to take on because of the product of historical drift, migration, war that shaped the place of your birth. They may be recognizable hybrids or dialects but they also might be moods within a language without a formal name but that you can identify by place or time or group. Think about the decades of your childhood, the sound of the adults around you. There may be many languages there.
These are also the languages that you moved yourself into, whether those are spoken languages you learned through study, travel, or emigration, or the languages of certain communities or trades where you belong enough to its conversation that the sound of your voice and the vocabulary of your thinking has enlarged.
What are the principles of order, syntax, logic in these languages? What kind of concepts or descriptions are accessible through them? What are their poetics? What is possible to think in one language that is less easily approached in others? How do they create expressive energy or achieve clarity? How do they create a code of belonging? To whom does each of your languages bring you near, bring you into relation?

week reflection
Reflect on your week of writing. What has surfaced that surprised you? What approaches to the practice (time of day, duration of session, writing implements, spaces to work in, warmups or no, etc.) have worked for you? Write a memo to yourself about what you learned in this first week that you can carry forward into the next, both in terms of what you are bringing into focus within your writing, and the ways you want to work it into your day.
generator

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.

bookshelf as image pantry
Go to your bookshelves and open one of the books you’ve been meaning to read but haven’t, one that’s been waiting for you for a long time. Scan the pages until you find an object or image to borrow from it. Start from that object or image and write two short narratives using the same starting point. Let the first be a fairy tale. Let the second be a voiceover for a fictional documentary, in the voice of someone telling a story about the documentary subject when they were a reckless young person.