on writing exercises

"write for 5 minutes. never put your pen down. use only three-word sentences."

the above exercise is one deb margonlin gave us at a writing workshop i attended three years ago. i'm looking for more exercises.

in working on "una corda," i have many ideas, but i'm having trouble putting it down on paper and parsing out the themes and problems. then i thought: hey, maybe my writer friends could help me!

i want to do a series of writing exercises. i know i could google some, or think up my own (i already have). but there is something particularly inspiring about being "set to" an exercise by a teacher, friend, colleague, etc. i sent an email to a bunch of my writerly friends about a week ago asking for writing exercises. some responses were a whole page, some were one line. i invite you to leave writing exercises in the comments of this post. i plan to do every exercise i receive, and the more exercises folks leave, the more there will be for folks to use!