1) When you get a rejection slip from editors or agents, correct it for errors in grammar, spelling, and usage. Rejection slips are sometimes full of mistakes. This exercise will boost your ego.
2) Talk back to the people you see on television (preferably when no one else is in the house). This will help you develop an "attitude," first cousin to narrative style.
3) In the same vein, turn off the sound on your TV and make up the dialogue for a movie. Yes, it's just like "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" and it will help you learn how to write dialogue every bit as well as Uppity Snoot's book on Writing Realistic Dialogue for Fun and Profit.
4) Buy a how-to book on writing and throw darts at it so you don't take rules too seriously (including these).
5) Make up fifty words that don't exist, but should.
6) Stop making outlines. Nobody's looking over your shoulder. Write as you damn well please.
7) Remove the tags from your mattresses and pillows.
8) Read the marvelous, rambling, poetic, rich prose in Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. Next, read Hemingway. Note his spare style and economy of words. Try The Sun Also Rises. Compare the two works. Realize that there is no single style that writers use. Anything can be done with words.
9) Pay attention to your thoughts while you shave, stand in line at the bank, clean fish, etc. You can learn more from life than reading books about creating believable characters and interesting plots.
10) Try writing like twenty other authors who are famous and then disregard all of their styles. Constant imitation often leads to originality.
11) Ask yourself whether keeping a journal is doing anything but helping you repeat the same style, the same ideas, the same observations over and over again. There's nothing inherently evil in keeping a journal, but I think the activity is over-rated.
12) Make a graffiti board somewhere in your home, a big one with large, tear-away sheets. Scribble meaningless phrases on it when the spirit moves you. I think writing "Marie wears neon underwear" is a lot more interesting than writing a journal entry describing the angst you have because of school, spouses, bosses, whatever.
13) Listen to old people. Don't write what they're saying. Just listen.
14) Write a story with as many run-on sentences and sentence fragments as possible.
15) Make up ten titles for ten stories, but don't write the stories. Instead, only compose the last paragraph for each. For example, let's say you dream up a short story title called "Wired for Sound." The last few lines might go something like "Timmy's new bronze ear was a bit strange-looking, but the high priestess was one sexy gal, and if it was bronze ears she liked, then so much the better. He advanced toward the altar while the priestess painted herself red."
16) Always re-read what you've written six months later. You need to get perspective on what you've written, and you can gain more perspective from your own brain than the goofus sitting next to you in a writing class that breaks into small groups.
17) Ponder human nature while looking at a complex picture in Gray's Anatomy.
18) Attend a political rally at a candidate's campaign headquarters on election night. Observe the insanity and shallow behavior of people with slogans and balloon-hats on their heads. Observe the self-importance of most of those in attendance. Ask yourself if God intended this kind of behavior when he set the wheels in motion sixteen billion years ago.
19) Pay attention to your dreams. The important stuff your brain is trying to process goes on while you're sleeping.
20) Notice how many people in malls and on escalators look at themselves in mirrors. Ask yourself why they do that. Is it because they're not sure they're really there?
