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

Minute Lists (11)
Choose five minute lists* of your own or use these: words ending with -ock; words pertaining to card games; names for streets in a suburban subdivision; botanical names for groundcover plants (real or invented); onomatopoeias for sounds in your immediate environment.
*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.

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

Ordinary Intensities
An audio version of this tuning exercises is playable at the bottom of the page.
Think about something from your ordinary life, something you don’t necessarily associate with the impulse to write, but with your daily routine. Think back through it, if you already did it today, or perhaps take some time now to do either something you have to do—a pee break, a tidy-up of the room, a message you’re obligated to send, food you need to prepare—or something you like to do that you do every day—a coffee break, sitting in a particular chair, whatever. As you do this ordinary thing, take it as more than what it is by itself: take it on as an occasion, an incitement, to writing. Seek out the thing that is intense in it, that is, something strong enough to move you to feeling, thinking or feelingthinking, and toward the impulse to record. Write a short piece (try either exactly 50 or exactly 100 words) that is occasioned by that ordinary intensity.
Read what you wrote aloud. Write a note-to-self, about the texture and interest of attention in the piece you just wrote. See if you can carry that texture and interest into your other writing or making for the day. Think of this attention as a kind of digging tool or dousing rod or radar: an instrument that allows you to home in on intensity within a scene.
generator

the new-room-of-the-house dream
Take up the classic dream of finding a new room or wing of the house you live in (or one that you used to live in). You can either describe a time you had this dream, if you have this dream (supposedly this is a dream archetype, like the unprepared anxiety dream) or use your writing to dream awake, or dream on behalf of a character or figure in the world of your writing.
Write a description of the room and what you found there. Continue your description through waking up. Is it a relief or disappointment to learn the room was only dreamt? What does this tell you or your character about what is missing?

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.