Resources

Tell your whole life (or just today) in exactly six words. Hemingway started it. You finish it.

Open a book. Steal the first line. Write a totally new story from it. Return the line later. Maybe.

Write down something a stranger said this week. Build a scene around it without explaining how it got there.

Write two true things about your character and one outrageous lie. The lie becomes the story.

Pick a place. Write only what the five senses notice. No emotions. No backstory. Just the world.

Take your favorite character and ruin their day. Now explain — sympathetically — why they earned it.

Choose an object on your desk. Interview it. What is it tired of? What's it never told anyone?

Take a true memory and rewrite it as horror. Then as romance. Then as a recipe. Notice what survives.

Write the final sentence of a story. Now write everything that had to happen to earn it.

Tell five complete stories, each in exactly one sentence. Bonus points for one that makes someone gasp.

Pick a color. Describe a person, a meal, a fight, and a memory — all without naming the color once.

Write a letter to someone you've seen but never spoken to. Be honest. You don't have to send it.

Pick a classic. The villain narrates. Suddenly the moral is… complicated.

Open a textbook, a cereal box, or a junk email. Pull out 12 words. Arrange them into a poem.

Describe today's weather as if it's reflecting the mood of someone who just got bad news.

Write a scene narrated by someone who is definitely lying. Don't tell the reader. Let them figure it out.