Close your eyes. Write about what you see.

Make a list of activities that take place over a brief period of time, a few hours at most. Here are some ideas, but come up with your own: a dinner date, changing a flat tire, birthday party, a drive home from school, a basketball game, or cleaning your room. Try to write a short (five-page) story confined to that period of time.

Write a couple of pages composed entirely of a character's thoughts, elucidating the mental state of a character before he or she does something pivotal, like getting married, or shooting a penalty kick, or robbing a convenience store, or stepping off a bridge, or getting shot in the head.

Explore the forbidden today. Begin with a memory, something already risked. Recapture, in writing, the sensual experience; make up what you don't recall. Or, approach something currently forbidden: an affair, belching in public, eating a whole chocolate cake by yourself. Risk it on paper; it's authentic when you feel the physical thrill.

Write an "I'll get to it today" poem. Why wait? Achieve something today. This poem could even be about writing a poem today.

Write about a time someone said no.

Imagine an accident. It might be minor--a finger cut while slicing vegetables, a knocked-over vase--or it might be major--a car wreck, a gallery of paintings destroyed by a fire sprinkler.

Now, write several versions of the accident: a one-sentence summary, a one-paragraph summary, a full scene, and finally, a slo-o-o-o-wed down version of the scene. It may help to think of filmmaking. Begin with a panoramic establishing shot and let the camera keep zooming in, closer and closer, to an extreme close-up.

Perfectionism is a primary writer's block. We want to write--we just want to do it perfectly. With this tool you will deliberately indulge in some "bad writing."

Step one: Buy three tabloids (e.g., National Enquirer, The Star; if you cannot find tabloids, buy People or Us). Scissors in hand, read your tabloids. Snip out ten stories that strike you. Clip your stories together and save them in a file folder. Did you notice any common denominators in the stories that interested you? Were they upbeat or downbeat? Weird? Kinky or heartwarming?

Step two: Set aside one half hour. Writing as fast as you can, longhand, write a make-believe tabloid story. Make up characters, incidents, and quotes. Be outrageous. Meet and marry aliens from outer space. Discover your long-lost twin. Survive a grizzly attack. Win five million dollars. Write boldly and badly. Scribble this story off. At the end of one half hour, stop writing.

Put aside one day a month to do nothing. Take one of them and be completely lazy. You don't have to dress if you don't want. Let things be. At the end of the day, sidle over to your notebook, but only if you feel like it, and write. If you don't write, it's okay too. The benefits of a lazy day will feed your writing for a long time.

Write a short-short story of the scene in a photograph [find a photo from a magazine with two or more people in it; snapshots are also okay, as long as you don't know the people in them]. The piece must begin with a line of dialogue spoken by one of the people in the photo to someone else in the photo. Set yourself a time limit (15 min) or a page limit (2) or word count (1,000).