Part 1. Create a grocery list. But instead of groceries, write down everything you’re interested in. Spend ~5 minutes doing this.

Part 2. Stand up and walk around the room. Look at everyone else’s list. Pick at least three items to steal and add to your own.

Part 3. Roll a single dice. Take this number of words from your list. Create a sentence with these words. You can use filler words if you want.

This exercise was adapted from Kyoko Hamada’s “Grocery List” prompt in the book The Photographer’s Playbook edited by Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern (Aperture, 2014).

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. [...] There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

| Michael Cunningham, The Hours