Stories can come from the most unexpected places. Training yourself to pay attention to these small moments of inspiration can help you to find the stories that are floating around you in everyday life.

Case in point: even just your regular trip to the grocery store can be a goldmine of potential stories. Here are three prompts to help you develop that paying-attention-to-the-mundane muscle.

Exercise 1: The recipe.

For this exercise, put yourself in the perspective of a character who’s preparing a shopping list for a specific meal. Something about this meal is important. It could be the dish itself—an old family recipe that brings back memories of childhood, for instance, or the character’s first attempt at something fancy or complicated they’ve always wanted to try. Or the dish could be normal but the context is special: it’s for their partner and they’re planning to propose at the end, maybe, or they’re making a key dish for a family function or important dinner party.

To start, think of what they’re making. Write an annotated recipe and associated shopping list. Mark which ingredients they have at home and which they need to buy. Is there anything they’d have to get from a specialty store? Any unfamiliar ingredients they’ve never used before? Put some notes in from the character—specific brands they prefer, for example, or substitutions they’re making because of a diner’s allergies or preferences.

If you’re having fun with the recipe/shopping list form, see if you can inject a sense of narrative and character into it to turn it into a story in its own right. If you’d rather do something more traditional, use this recipe as a starting point for a story that shows the character preparing to make this meal.

Exercise 2: Cleanup on Aisle 5.

Somebody just made a mess of things. For this exercise, let’s start with the mess, and make it big: an entire pallet of flour packages split open and spilled, a display of soda bottles spraying sticky liquid down the aisle, a whole freezer of ice cream melted over the cooler—that kind of thing.

Now, step back. What happened, and why? Did an irate customer throw a destructive tirade? Was it an emergency like an earthquake or a shooting? Or maybe it was something more mundane: a toddler’s tantrum; an equipment malfunction; that new stock kid coming in more stoned than usual and forgetting how to use the forklift.

Once you’ve figured out these details, write a story from the perspective of the employee who’s cleaning the mess up. In the course of this, reveal the details of what happened and the consequences of those events using flashback, dialogue, and context.

Exercise 3: Chopped challenge.

I’m guessing most people are at least aware of the TV show Chopped, but just in case: it’s a cooking competition show where all contestants get the same basket of ingredients, and have to cook a dish higlighting those ingredients in the allotted time.

To start this prompt, bring a notebook with you on your next grocery shopping trip. As you’re going through the store, jot down details that stand out to you—a new food item you’ve never seen before, a funny phrase or image on a package, a fellow shopper who looks or acts in an eye-catching way. Try to write down at least 5 things over the course of your trip.

When you get home, cut the paper so each detail you noticed is its own piece. Fold them and put them in a bowl, then randomly pull out 4 items. These are your basket ingredients. Set a timer for 20 minutes and write a story that incorporates these 4 details as central images, characters, or objects.

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