Some time ago, I wrote a couple of “improv” tools to help writers (poets, mostly) break writers block some time ago… simpler than this, since they’re for poetry rather than prose. One uses a situation and a control word and the other uses a work of art and a control word. The control words are chosen from a database of 500 or so words, and help prevent plagiarism (The original purpose of the “improv” tool was to help us detect plagiarists who applied… each app requires 2 prewritten poems and one improvisational work… even if the improv work isn’t very good we can almost always pick out whether someone’s a legit writer or not) as well as providing a sort of starting point to help them focus in and get something down.