
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.

two-tone etude
Write a tiny narrative of a fictional event that uses only words beginning with two letters of your choice. Borrow a bit of letter-color synesthesia and imagine that, for example, all words beginning with e are a purply grey-blue, and all words beginning with j are bright orange, and use only words beginning with e or j: make tiny a two-tone story. Let the difficulty of the constraint maximize the weird, free-range exactitude of the chronicle you can tell. This is a minute list in disguise; the point is to wake up your vocabulary.
tuning excercise

In a Borrowed Voice
Borrow a voice to speak to you as the voice in your head, one that will narrate your thoughts back to you. The voice should be both glamorous and trustworthy, maybe a movietone voice, or a poet from another land, or a broadcaster from another century. A voice you can trust and enjoy.
In this voice, speak to yourself about whatever you’ve been chewing on or nurturing as an image to be written or area to be explored—the thing on the near horizon that you’ve been wanting to write. (This might be something new, or it might be an intuition about another layer or further unfolding in whatever you’re currently writing.) Take advantage of what your borrowed voice offers—stylish bluntness? seductive lyricism? melancholic goodness? Let the voice diagnose and clarify your intentions and tell you something about what you need to do to be able to keep going.
The point of using the voice is not only the pleasure of ventriloquism but the slightly askew angle of approach to the territory of your own mind. If borrowing a voice is uninteresting or too weird, try speaking to yourself as yourself, but as if from this place askew to your habitual centerline.

Magnificence Tuner
Describe an utterly magnificent theatrical experience or book or poem (or song or…). Describe it in exactly four sentences with no concern for its feasibility.
Then take a moment to read your description to find out what it tells you about your own desires. Can you identify a way to allow some of this magnificence into the thing you are currently writing or about to write?
generator

Populate the Silences (2)
A concept from Deep Listening is that we are always listening to both sound and silences. Listening for silence is thrown into relief with hypotheticals. For example: look up the clouds and then imagine the burst of noise of fireworks bursting in the sky right where you are looking. If you could not hear the present silence, then you could not hear the fireworks that could populate that space of silence. Silence as a space of potential.
In this prompt, think of silence as an empty expanse that might house something. It might be sonic but might also be visual or spatial.
Write a scene for a particular place or type of landscape. If you can’t think of one, borrow one of these: the food court at a mall, a waiting area for a commuter ferry, an alpine base camp, a dog park.
Something conversational is taking place in the scene—perhaps two people are debating what’s going on inside their pet cat’s mind or hashing out a complex plan to infiltrate a cult. You can poach this conversational something from somewhere else — it’s really only there to help define the space while you work. If you are in the middle of writing something, perhaps you can poach the conversational something from what you’ve already written.
As you write the conversation, tune into the silences that surround the speakers. Look for places within the scene to populate those silences with sound. Let this generator teach you something more about the place where your scene unfolds. The conversation seem at first to be the center of the scene, but stay open to the possible grown—in energy, interest, focus—of the silences around them as they populate.
(This generator is adapted from an Audio Walk prompt which draws on a Deep Listening exercise. See the original post for more on the source.)

Walking as Occasion
Go to your bookshelves (or wherever else your old reading is gathered), and collect a series of fragments that contemplate an abstraction. (For example the idea of the soul, the self, the nature of time, the color green, the presence of the past, the experience of hunger, the idea of renewal.)
Conjure a figure in mind. See the figure taking a walk through a site that is somehow well paired with the contemplation, whether through historical association or accessible quietude or any other line of connection. The site needn’t be an obviously contemplative place. You could write a walk for a subway platform that contemplates commute or migration. The same walk, deployed on a walk next to a river, might cast an entirely different tone on the contemplation. What about the same walk up and down the aisles of your local Target?
Write a short piece that counterbalances the geography and specificity of the site and the steady non-narrative progress of walking with the gathered contemplative fragments. Think of the walk as the jewel setting and the fragments the jewels. Or you might send the sparkle in reverse, make the description of the grocery aisle the real diamond.
The target of the writing is to think through the contemplative fragments, but the walk through the site is used as the necessary narrative occasion for setting the contemplation in motion.
You may choose to signal the quotation or not. This could be an exercise in incorporation, in which case you can offer citation afterwards, if you wish.
*This was adapted from a prompt for an audio walk. See the original prompt here.