If you’re stuck in your writing and looking for a way to come up with new ideas, give this a try.

Within ten minutes write as many opening sentences to different stories as you can. Don’t get too hung up on them, the idea is to ‘free write’ and get down as many as possible. Say, for example, you write 50. Then go through for another ten or twenty minutes and continue each sentence until you have a series of first paragraphs. Hopefully, you’ll end up with about 20 to 25, which is a great hit rate.

This is a great idea. I’ve heard of it through various workshops, but it was Kelly Link who brought this to my attention again.

Here’s a first paragraph that came to me when I did the exercise.

Trent wiped sleep from his eyes, stretched and looked out the window. The world was gone. In its place was the darkness of space. A planet rolled by. That’s impossible, he thought. Just then he heard the glass in the window crack. He ran to it and checked the lock.