First make a list of  emotions people feel intensely–e.g., anger, shyness, boredom.

Now consider Shelly, a woman who lives under a perpetual black cloud. She was in an automobile accident, not her fault, which required two back surgeries. Her father was diagnosed with cancer, told he had six months to live, and died in two weeks. Her boss decided to move to another state. Her vision blurred, and she learned she has a benign but inoperable brain tumor, which required a shunt to drain the fluid build-up that was causing the blurred vision.The shunt broke–twice. She went to the ER for heart issues and learned she has an over-active thyroid. The chest X-ray revealed a mass in her thoracic cavity, but her doctors feel they cannot operate until the thyroid problem is under control, lest she die while under anesthesia. An MRI two weeks later shows that the mass is bigger.

Write a sketch of Shelly–her personality, behavior, beliefs–that would result in feeling the various emotions in your list. Some will be no-brainers, but try to do this for the least likely emotions as well.

Write down the most boring, enervating activity you know–or can imagine. It could be folding laundry. Or listening to your father-in-law tell his story of the fish that got away for the eleven hundredth time. Or waiting in an office where you can’t use your cell phone. Whatever.

Now write a paragraph–or scene–or entire story in which that activity is crucial to the plot. Convey to your reader not just the boredom but the foreboding of something bad to come. Think shower scene in “Psycho.” Practice using the everyday to build tension.

Think of the last time you saw a stray, incongruous item on the street or roadway–such as a mattress beside the interstate, a single brown shoe at a busy intersection, or a winding two-lane road with a brown jacket on the double yellow line. Now write the story of how it came to be there.

A woman buys a six pound bag of epsom salt intending to soak her aching feet. On the back of the bag she notices directions for use as a laxative and as a fertilizer. What problem does she decide to solve by using epsom salt? And how does that create more problems?

Search your work for these words and closely examine each usage. They often contribute to run-on sentences that would be stronger and clearer if they were revised into two or more shorter sentences.  Be especially wary if one sentence contains two or all three of these words.

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.