Here’s a truly nifty prompt generator for you: the Special Projects Generator. You can press the shuffle button, or you can use the arrow keys to go up or down in a given category. This yields a three-word phrase describing a unique ‘project,’ such as:

• changeable rubber garden
• do-it-yourself glitter furniture
• ingenious collapsible magazine
• dramatic morphing orchestra

Use one of the above or go to the site and generate your own favorite. Then do one of the following with it:

• Write up a proposal (deadpan or over-the-top silly) for this project.
• Write a story in which this object, device, or whatever appears or has a role.
• Imagine the kind of world in which such a device would be commonplace, and explore it.
• Imagine that you’re a venture capitalist and someone has just given you a presentation on this project. Justify why you would or wouldn’t fund it, either seriously or or not.
• Explain what the project is and how we absolutely, positively need it in our world. Make as compelling an argument for it as you possibly can, no matter how silly the item is (in fact, the sillier the better).

I found this link at the PHS Computer Project Lab’s Monday Links for Educators.

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Recently I suggested to someone who was cleaning out junk drawers that they take their unidentifiable finds and turn them into creativity exercises. They did so, and deliciously decided to share the finds with us. Today, check out their included photo and come up with your own explanation for what on earth that metallic item could be. (If you know what it really is, no cheating and relying on reality!)

Sometime when you want some additional inspiration, go clean out a bunch of your own drawers and look for something similarly unidentifiable. Put it on a table in front of a sheet of paper and write down any idea you can think of for what it might be!

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We has the internets

It’s high time I did another “prompt on the web”—a link to a nifty prompt found on someone else’s site so you can get all SORTS of inspiration from everywhere! Today’s inspiration comes from Design your writing life, and I insist, insist, that you check out the prompt, Paddling in the Kayak, a Wiki Parable. I was hooked from the first two phrases:

Once upon a time, just yesterday, …

So go to it! Read the parable’s beginning and continue it from there!

Children’s book authors Glen and Karen Bledsoe have helpfully provided a set of writing prompt generators. One provides a phrase (”the [adjective] [noun] that went [verb/phrase]”). For example:

The shy scratching post that went fishing

The second provides three random items, to be combined in a story. For example:

A zucchini squash, a fishing rod, and a Tarot deck.

The final generator is a complex piece that provides a plot out of the following building blocks: protagonist, antagonist, setting, goal, an important event, and an important object.

Today, use one of the above examples, or go to the page and randomize your own. Enjoy, and pay a visit to the Bledsoes’ page frequently!

Gravity Wins

I recently found a wonderful blog of inspiring and thought-provoking quotations and such: Travis Eneix. In particular the following quote caught my attention:

Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. Once you have determined the spiritual principles you wish to exemplify, abide by these rules as if they were laws, as if it were indeed sinful to compromise them. Don’t mind if others don’t share your convictions. How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be? Your nobler self cannot wait any longer.
— Epictetus

Today, do one of the following:

• Write about an ideal you’d like to get serious about. Write about how you might make it a rule of your life. Write about how you can abide by it as though it was the core of your deepest religion.
• Do the same as above, but from the point of view of a fictional character you’d like to write about.
• Write up a set of ideals as though they were the laws of a fictional land. Be as idealistic, optimistic, and grandiose as you like.

I admit it, the site design over at WritingFix makes me dizzy thanks to its overly-busy look and wild array of colors. However, it has a ton of prompt categories that you should take a look at:

Daily Writing Prompts provides a very nice random prompt generator that chooses one from over 500 possibilities, such as:

“What can we learn from contrast? Write a description of something very dark (like a crow) in a very light place (like a field of snow). Make the dark thing seem innocent and the light thing seem ominous.”

Right-brained prompts includes a wide variety of visual sparks, poetry prompts, sentence creators, alliterative sparks, story starters, and more. This example comes from one of the Serendipitous Word Games options:

• Setting: the top floor of a building
• Character: an artist
• Conflict: the ground is covered with something awful

Poetic prompts are prompts just for poets, such as the random poetic phrases generator.

Left-brained prompts make use of the logical side of the brain to get your fingers moving. For instance, you might try the Start and Stop Game, in which “your writing’s first and last sentence must contain the same word, phrase, or clause.” I love the first one I generated:

“if I knew any better”

If that isn’t enough, the site also contains:

• Picture book prompts
• Chapter book prompts
• Literature prompts

Use one of the above prompts or go to there and generate your own. Either way, make sure you visit their site. Hopefully someday they’ll pick some colors that are easier on the eyes.

Today I recommend that you visit the Not My Desk New Food Dire Warning And/Or Healthful Revelation Generator. Generate a dire warning or two and start writing:

• A press release warning the public about this new hazard. Be as deadpan or over-the-top as you please. In the case of a revelation, a press release extolling its benefits.
• A story about someone afflicted with or paranoid about contracting the new problem. In the case of a revelation, a story about someone who prays his life will be changed by it.
• A story about the new plague or benefit’s effects on society.
• A free-write based on the concepts linked by the warning or revelation.
• A poem based on the unusual linkage of images and thoughts.

For today’s exercise, try the following pre-generated health revelation:

Butter sculptures shown to prevent creeping jowls.

Random generators of nearly any kind can be used for writing—they don’t have to specifically be plot generators, character generators, or the like.

“write with curiosity”
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The Writers Corner is a new community with the following goals:

A haven for writers, it is our intention to provide writing prompts, contests and other such means of enticing the imagination into overdrive. Supportive hands will guide you through your journey into the world of publication, or so we hope.

It includes a ton of wonderful of prompts for you to enjoy and explore. Today, try this one:

In 400 words or less answer this. If time stopped but you did not, what would you do first and why?

Also consider this: just as folks like to say that pleasure without pain has no meaning, so freedom has little meaning without limits. Free-writing is often best done with a definitive, planned end-point, whether that’s planned in word-count (”400 words or less”), space (one side of a sheet of paper), or time (20 minutes). Otherwise you can end up pushing past the point where you’re still coming up with real material, and you go back to spinning your wheels.

At Word Imperfect, you’ll find a daily word posted. You’re invited there to create a new definition for each word as it’s posted, and then folks can vote on their favorites. Today, visit and check out the most recent word. Contribute your own definition and look at other posters’ definitions for inspiration afterwards. To warm up, come up with definitions for these recently posted words:

• pilose
• kymograph
• mattoid

A variation on this would be to create nonsense words out of random letters and define them. Here are a few to get you started:

• evelyse
• marifosic
• callax

Today’s prompt-on-the-web comes to you courtesy of The Student Story Starter. The Starter provides you–at the click of a button–with the following tidbits of information:

• Protagonist’s Gender
• Protagonist’s Job/Profession
• Antagonist
• Key Object or Symbol
• Setting
• Theme

It’s aimed at the modern world, and here’s one randomized selection to get you started today:

My protagonist is a female. My protagonist is a florist. The antagonist in my story is a day laborer. A key object or symbol in my story is a traffic light. My story will be set in a motor home. My story is about revelation.

My personal experience with this tool has been that it tends to provide one piece of information too many–usually I end up leaving out one thing, I think most often the setting, in the interests of not overloading the piece–but your mileage will, of course, vary. Regardless, I’d rather have it provide more than I need than not enough, since it’s easy to leave out a piece! I highly recommend visiting this little tool now and then and auto-generating a prompt or two.