Pick a number
Pick a random number between 1 and 30. We’ll call it number n. Then look to your bookshelf (real or virtual) and choose the nth book.
Open that book to the nth page and go to the nth sentence on that page.
Write that sentence down and make it the first sentence of a new freewriting exercise. Just write whatever comes to mind for the next sentence and the one after that, and so on.
Write at least as many sentences as the number you chose.
My example
Random number = 4
Sentence number 4
“Each individual tree is invited into the whole, and, in turn, helps support the entire group.”
Own writing
Every tree has roots, how strong are yours?
Confront the person you are.
By being your own worst enemy, you chop the tree down.
Showing kindness to yourself lets the roots grow deeper and the blossom to bloom.
Book number 29 The Burning Land by Bernard Cornwell
Page 29
Sentence 29 is on page 30, but hey.
Didn’t make it to 29 sentences but this is the story so far.
We were still slaughtering the last of the Danes when Finan’s scouts reported that horsemen were approaching the hill crest to the south. If we made haste, we might cut them off. No time to lay a trap and no cover to stage an ambush. Keeping the hostages alongside me, I headed straight toward them.
She breathed deep it seemed for the first time in many hours as the men galloped away. The infant in her arms was beginning to stir and she had feared it would cry out and give away their hiding place. When the Danes came, she had concealed herself and the child in a cart, burrowed beneath sacks of grain brought in for the priest. By some miracle no Dane sword had been thrust through the sacks to waste the best of the harvest. Perhaps they who now lay dead all around had planned some use for it? That other miracle that had aided her to live another day as she fled toward Mercia and her uncle’s protection would no doubt be short lived. Neither band of marauders had set light to the church or its barn. But if the men the Saxons rode out to meet were victorious, fire could yet rage through this dry thatch and wooden posts. She must move and swiftly, but which direction was safe