There are dares, which people exchange on the forums (e.g. "I dare you to put a dragon named Cuddly into your book!). I have heard the dares praised as a way to get unstuck if you have no idea what to do with your characters. One woman declared that the dragons she'd only put into her book to brave that dare had actually enriched her worldbuilding.
There's going to a public place, closing your eyes for a count of ten, and then writing into your story the first stranger you see.
There are elaborate descriptions of objects, regardless of plot importance. Quick! Pick an object you've mentioned in this chapter. Now find a thousand wordsto say about it. Go! (I do too much elaborate description of objects as it is. This would, for me, be a disastrous strategy in the long run.)
There's the Bartlett's Quotations manoeuver, whereby one flips Bartlett's open to a random page and chooses a random quote, which then gets to occur as the epigraph to a randomly selected chapter of your novel.
There's the song lyrics gambit, whereby the song the character hears on the radio, or sings in the bar, or whatever, can be included, verbatim and complete, in your ms. Heck, you're not trying to sell it as is, so it's hardly a violation of copyright. (It's a day's work for me to generate a song if I want my characters to sing. Hazards of fantasy worldbuilding.)
A few of them have been published, and one of them won a very prestigious (in the industry, anyway) award from the Romance Writers of America. Scoff not! She who wins the Rita sells her next book.
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There's going to a public place, closing your eyes for a count of ten, and then writing into your story the first stranger you see.
There are elaborate descriptions of objects, regardless of plot importance. Quick! Pick an object you've mentioned in this chapter. Now find a thousand wordsto say about it. Go! (I do too much elaborate description of objects as it is. This would, for me, be a disastrous strategy in the long run.)
There's the Bartlett's Quotations manoeuver, whereby one flips Bartlett's open to a random page and chooses a random quote, which then gets to occur as the epigraph to a randomly selected chapter of your novel.
There's the song lyrics gambit, whereby the song the character hears on the radio, or sings in the bar, or whatever, can be included, verbatim and complete, in your ms. Heck, you're not trying to sell it as is, so it's hardly a violation of copyright. (It's a day's work for me to generate a song if I want my characters to sing. Hazards of fantasy worldbuilding.)
A few of them have been published, and one of them won a very prestigious (in the industry, anyway) award from the Romance Writers of America. Scoff not! She who wins the Rita sells her next book.