WoW: Johnson's Exercises/extra credit

Here is one of Johnson’s suggestions to get the writing muscles warmed up:

Spend five minutes listing everything you can think of that’s the color blue; tomorrow, green, and so on…

Wednesday, 11/12: blue
sky, water, kids' and husband's eyes, jeans, house, bird, roses, cloak, college colors, dragon, crayon, dress, feelings, comedy, diapers

Thursday, 11/13: green
leaves, traffic light, my eyes, diaper bag, mold, eggs, grass, money, vegetables, kiwi, apple

Friday, 11/14: purple
flowers, blouses, truffle tin, index cards, shoes, filing crates, amethyst, eggplant, rain, eyeliner, yoga mat, poppet

Saturday, 11/15: red
wagon, fire truck, lis, cheeks, cape, apple, tomato, ornaments, blood, balloon

Sunday, 11/16: black
cat, tie, bat, light, hat, book, box, night, mood, dress, hole, pride, clouds, limo, heart, panther, wolf

Monday, 11/17: white
paper, flag, rabbit, smoke, hat, snow, out, ghost, rice, sugar

Tuesday, 11/18: brown
cow, hair, nose, wood, stone, molasses, dirt, chocolate, leather

This was a hard one to do, for several reasons (mostly my fault):
I did these at night, usually when I was too tired to think.
I tried to limit myself to not using the same word for more than two colors.
I tried to limit use of same-category words within each color, like food and animals.

I probably would have gotten more from it had I not written them at the last minute, and maybe if I'd done the other exercise (the alphabet). Glad I gave it a try, though!

Write on Wednesday: Warm Ups

Do you do writing exercises or warm ups? Do you think they could be valuable? Have you found warm up exercises helpful in some other area of your life, e.g. art, music, athletics?

Extra Credit: Try one of Johnson’s exercises above, and post about your experiences. Or create an exercise of your own and share it.

I've been wanting to start the Artist's Pages on and off for a few years now. A friend of mine was going to "lead" a group of us with this, but had to put it off due to too much life happening at once. I should ask her if she's still interested. I'm sure that both kinds of warmups (freestyle and themed) are valuable, each in its own way, and this is probably different for each writer. I used to be a middle-distance runner (800m to 5K) in high school (which was 20+ years and 40 pounds ago), and I know that practice (from sprints to long-distance running) and conditioning (stretching for flexibility, and weights for strength) were crucial to my performance.

I think I will try one of Johnson's warm-ups, maybe for a week, and post those results a week from today.