"The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar." - Michel De Montaigne

1. Take out an old magazine and a pair of scissors. Cut out a few bodies from various advertisements. Spread them out on a table. Choose one magazine-body then write a description of that person - physical, psychological, biographical, etc. Choose another magazine-body and write a description of that person too. How is the second character related to the first character? Perhaps they have not yet met. Write out a short scene for the characters to interact. Continue with the exercise for each magazine-body if you wish.

2. Sketch out a description of a character. Perhaps use one of your previous characters from exercise one. Place that character in a life changing event - loses a loved one, survives a fire, etc. Does he write a book about his experience? Does she sell all her possessions and move to India? Describe how that character changes.

3. Choose as a character an animal or an inanimate object. Put this animal or object into a scene where it interacts with a human. For example, say you are writing as your couch. Perhaps your couch complains to you about how it must constantly take abuse from the cats when they sharpen their claws. Or how it feels ugly because it hasn't been cleaned in a very long time, maybe never. Make your animal or object character quirky.

1. One of the best plot developers I have come across is called the "Hero's Journey." You can read the book, The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler to get more of an insight on this. It shows you the basic 12 stages found in most stories and how to use them in your stories. I highly recommend it.

2. Outline a sequel to a favorite book or movie. How would you want to see that story develop? What are the conflicts? What are the solutions?

3. Do some brainstorming exercises with a partner. One of you invents a character and a situation: For example, "A forty-two year old woman, single and living with two cats, falls madly in love with her auto mechanic." Then the other person invents what happens next. "She begins to write him anonymous love letters and quietly stalks him." Then the first person picks up where the second left off and so on. It's Ok to be silly. Actually, it's more fun to be silly.

1. Take a fairy tale (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Jack and the Beanstalk) and write it from the point of view of someone other than the main character.

2. Rewrite a scene from a favorite book (or perhaps your own story) in the point of view of a minor character.

3. Take another scene from a favorite book and rewrite it in another point of view; either first or third. See how you can convey much of the same information in that one point of view.

4. Go back to the last few novels you've read. Identify the points of view. Look at how points of view were combined. Continue to do this as you read more novels. Look for point of view lapses and mid-scene shifts.

1. Listen to talk radio for a half hour and see how many cliches you can pick out in the hosts's, guest's and caller's speech. It isn't bad to use cliches in speech, but where they shouldn't be is in your writing, and this is a good way to practice cliche spotting.

2. Read poetry. Reading poetry you can get a better sense of the possibilities of language in a shorter time.

3. Describe your favorite painting in the most detail possible.

4. Describe the house or apartment in which you grew up.

5. Read a dictionary. Try to read one page a day and find uses for the new words you come across.

6. Keep a journal. Take about ten minutes a day to use your journal to work on your prose.