Ready to exercise your creative muscle? Are you looking for ways to give more depth to your writing? Get involved. Meeting new people enhances your ability to build interesting characters. Merged traits from multiple people into one character. Have fun with it. What is their quirk? What does their voice sound like? Sit alone at a restaurant or coffee shop and observe people. Focus on the way people move when they talk, whether they lean in or away, how they laugh. This may find its way into your next novel.
Take a walk around town and open your mind to the sights, smells, and sounds you experience. Sit outside and close your eyes. What do you hear? Really focus. If you’re in the city, it may be car horns, trucks brakes, slamming doors, or people yelling. In the suburbs, maybe you get different sounds: birds, dogs, kids playing, the wind in the trees, or a train in the distance. At my house on Mondays, the explosions from the nearby military base rattle our walls. Take the time to write about those sounds. See how many descriptive words or phrases you can come up with for them.
Walk through a store and focus on smells. You might pick up a whiff of perfume as a person passes by. Maybe you catch the fragrance of the roasted chicken from the deli section. Does it smell different in the frozen food section? Can you smell the cold?
You get the idea. These are great exercises and especially wonderful if you are suffering from writer’s block. Changing your scenery and stretching your creative muscle will get you rolling again in no time.