Week 1:
Put your ipod on shuffle and pick the song it lands on. Use both the title and band name somehow in your writing of a new or existing piece (this isn't about the lyrics). You can use them conceptually or actually put the words themselves in. Don't skip to the next song because you don't like it!! (unless it's a foreign title you have no idea what means)
Week 2:
Get a group of people and ask them to each write a person and an action on a slip of paper. preferably each person should do more than one of each, depends on how many people you have. (both action and person should be simple yet specific- ie A gay rockstar with a drinking problem or a troubled lawyer- killing a bee or turning off street lights with a wave of a hand)
now shuffle up those skips of paper and pass them out so you don't get your own! it's best played with people who will give you some variety to work with. maybe they don't write the same genre as you do. you can get out of your comfort zone, or learn to make that work for your own type of writing!
week 3:
Some simple character development. Write 100 things down about your character. physical descriptions, likes, dislikes, fears, childhood stories...etc. It helps keep things straight and it can be good for undeveloped characters because you'll just learn things as you write.
week 4:
Work from this:
A sound came from behind, a certain drip, drip, drip...It was the only sound in the darkness. As the drip continued something slid across the floor from behind and crept forward slowly until it met his shoes. He turned....
week 5:
pick an avatar, it doesn't have to be your own. Now make it a character. If you feel like it, randomly pick all the avatars on a page and put them in the same story together. what in the world is a pirate doing with a chicken and a school girl?!
prompt 6:
This time it's an editing exercise! Print out a smaller piece of work (a short story or 1 chapter of a longer piece). Go through it and highlight every adverb in one color and every adjective in another. Now, it's up to you to decide how many of these you consider acceptable. For every person it's a different amount. Some writers don't want a single one in their piece and others go by a couple a page...whatever. You're the writer. Having the words all highlighted and physically in front of you so you can see every page without having to scroll helps visualize. Take out the adj/adv you don't need.
Prompt 7:
It's another editing exercise and one that made me want to pull out my hair, but I'm so glad I did it in the end. Just like in the last prompt, print out some material to work with. Don't bother stapling the pages together. What you will do is cut apart your different scenes, literally. Get them scissors and cut everything into sections. It's up to you how large or short of parts you cut your story into. Next, start to reorder things. Play around with what happens when you put certain scenes next to each other. You may find that your story really starts a page in and you never knew until you literally put that most interesting moment at the start and looked at it. You may have started with a linear story or one that involved a lot of flashbacks, but try to see how it looks when the events don't play out exactly as you thought it should. Not every story needs to be 'typical' of what's expected of it. Maybe your story needs to play out backwards because what's most interesting is how everything got to be the way it is in the first place. I never thought this activity would be useful, but I did end up reordering the short story I did this with.
Prompt 8
and http://www.collegehumor.com/picture/...is-is-so-funny
not really a prompt, but oh so important for a writer (and funny)
Prompt 9
(taken from a review of the book Fire in Fiction. Review found here