Write a story around a bottle of wine with a pickled snake coiled inside.

Similes add color and tone to your writing. Don’t overdo. And avoid the worn and weary ones–such as hard as a rock, soft as a cotton ball, etc.

Make a list of fifty adjectives. They can be as simple as big, ugly, or shy. List the adjectives in a column, one adjective per line.

Turn each word into a simile by adding “as” and finishing the comparison. For example, ugly as a rotting stump. Try for comparisons that are fresh but meaningful.

People who have trouble sleeping are often advised to establish a routine, go to bed at about the same time every night, get up at the usual time even if you didn’t get to sleep till late, avoid distractions near bedtime, keep TVs and books out of the bedroom, and so forth.

People who have trouble writing should take parallel advice: write about the same time every day, sit down to write at the usual time even if you didn’t finish your to-do list first, avoid starting a chore or project right before your writing time, don’t take phone calls during your writing time, and keep TV off or in another room. And for goodness sake, don’t clean up your desk before you start! It’s as lethal as trying to sleep immediately after working out at the gym.

Everyone advises new writers to write every day. That was a tip you read here–if not first, at least early on. If you have difficulty getting down to writing, find a time when you can write every day–get up a bit earlier, use half of your lunch hour, use your commute (assuming you aren’t driving!), take the time right after the kids are in bed–whatever works for you. It can be as little as half an hour a day. During that time, write. Never take you fingers off the keyboard–or the pen off the yellow pad. And at the end of that time, stop. Do not worry about where you are, just stop.

If you stop in the middle of a scene, a paragraph, even in the middle of a sentence, that’s a good thing. When you take it up again, you have a built-in prompt: just finish what you started and keep going. There is no need to prime the pump. This works best if you do write every day.

The problem with finding a good stopping place is the inertia working against getting started again. By definition, a good stopping place means that something is about to change. Finding the new direction can overwhelm the impetus to write.

Bottom line: stop in the middle of something.

I

Write “My mother never…” and then complete the sentence. List several things she never did. Build a story around the things she didn’t do. Focus on what they tell you about her personality, needs, situation, conflicts, fears, etc.

If need be, substitute a grandmother, aunt, or other female important in your life.

Writers often want someone to read a draft and give an opinion. Think twice. Or three times.

Family members generally fall into two categories: those who offer unconditional adulation, and those who are masters of the put-down. They are convenient but not always the best choice. Ask for comments primarily from other writers, or at least from experienced readers.

If you choose to belong to a critique group, choose peers who are of good heart–i.e.,no one is out to be top dog. The focus is on everyone making everyone else’s writing better, no competition.

Ask whoever comments on your work to be concrete, to identify specific instances to support any general statement. If the person says that you use strong verbs, ask for examples.

Get both positive and negative comments, and don’t defend your work. Getting feedback is not a debate. Your readers are responding to what is on the page, not what you were thinking or intending. Bring that up only if you are asking how to do it better.

And remember that suggestions are there for the taking–or not! But if there is a consensus on something–e.g., that the dialect is too heavy–ignore it at your own peril.

A man in assisted living doesn’t want to be a bother. He takes paper napkins with him, in the mesh carry bag attached to the handles of his walker, when he goes into the dining room and uses those instead of the cloth ones provided. One day, his supply is exhausted, and the next bus to the shopping mall won’t take residents there for three days.

Write the story. What happens? How does he cope? Or not. Make clear his relationships with staff and other residents.

People have speech patterns, habitual gestures, familiar facial expressions, and characteristic ways of walking. Writers also have writing habits–favorite words or expressions that often seem apt. Maybe you like voices that rumble like thunder. Perhaps you are partial to jettison for flummoxed. Take care that you don’t over-use these darlings. Once in any short story is sufficient. Think twice before repeating them even in a book-length manuscript.

Other words aren’t necessarily favorites, just so common–so universal–that they slip in unnoticed. Probably your readers won’t notice, either. But they are so insipid that they deaden your writing. I’m talking about words like smile, frown, scowl, laugh, sigh. I’m talking about faces that flush, eyes that fill with tears.

Make a list of words that you use a lot–that you suspect that you use too often. Use the edit function of your word processing program to find each instance of each of these words. Consider which can be replaced with more precise and/or more vivid alternatives.

To take an example familiar to most people reading this blog: if you have a child narrator/POV for telling the Biblical story of Noah’s ark, stop when the child is out of the story. Do not then add an authorial note about global warming, animal evolution, or anything else that is modern. If you have a mother narrating the loss of three children in a natural disaster, don’t add an authorial note after the mother’s death that tells how the one remaining daughter became a nun and devoted her life to working with children following natural disasters.

These examples are blatant, but beware of more subtle wrap-ups as well. If you have a wrap-up at all, as opposed to an ending, ask yourself whether it takes the reader out of the story itself, whether it adds anything relevant, whether you can do without it.

Keep a notebook/journal/folder–whatever suits your style–in which you record your especially vivid or disturbing dreams. Record the dream as soon after the event as you reasonably can, and include as many details as you remember, however bizarre, disjointed, or impossible they may be. You can make use of these dream records in at least two ways.

The most obvious way to use these dream records is when you need your character to have a dream. You can either lift it in toto or use it as a starting point. Much easier than creating a dream out of whole cloth.

Because dreams often contain odd just0positions, they also are useful when you are writing something that calls for a supernatural, mysterious, or merely unexpected series of events.

Once you are in the habit of collecting your dreams–and maybe the dreams told to you by family or friends–you will find yourself using them in surprising ways.