1. Force yourself to sit in a chair for an hour with pen and paper in front of you. Try it.

Hugh Cook says:-

"Right now I am living and working in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, which involves me in a lot of commuting, as I travel to a variety of places to teach English.

"Fortunately, a number of trains originate from my local station, so I am guaranteed to get a seat if I stand in line, even in the crowded morning rush hour period.

"I get a lot of writing done (on my laptop computer) during solid one-hour commutes which offer me no opportunity to use the Internet, watch TV, make a cup of coffee, go outside and water the grass, and so forth."

2. Try writing simple declarative sentences. Jack met Jill then married her then killed her, but you can't figure out how to handle the nuances of the relationship.

(Point: "Jack" is not a good pair for "Jill" in a fictional context because they are both "J" names. To be easily separated in the reader's mind, one of them should be changed.)

Okay. Just write it out in simple sentences, like this:-

"Jack met Mary. Jack married Mary. Jack killed Mary. Jack went to jail. Jack felt threatened by the other prisoners. Jack deliberately misbehaved in order to get himself locked up in solitary confinement, where he would be safe from the other prisoners. Mary showed up in Jack's solitary confinement cell. She has a knife.

"The doctor who thirty stitches which Jack required did not bother to counsel him about self-mutilation. Jack realized that, as far as the system was concerned, he was entirely expendable. And what if Mary came back? Presumably she would. He realized he had a problem."

3. Try pictures. You have this sentence "Jack married Mary" but you're stuck. Okay. Open up one of your "Let's get married" magazines. Or, if you don't have that kind of magazine lying around the house, punch "marriage" into www.google.com then click on the "images" button.

Hugh writes:-

"When I do this for real, on 2002 December 12, the image that stands out is a huge bunch of red roses that a bride is holding."

Red roses ... this relationship is not going to work out ... okay ... here's the idea ....

"Jack met Mary. Jack married Mary. The red roses wilted inside of a week. The white roses that Mary planted in the garden lasted a month longer, until Jack dug them up in one of his rages."

Key point: rather than thrashing around in a vacuum, it may help to explore some kind of enriched environment which may supply ideas, such as a database of images on the Internet.

Hugh says:-

"When I was writing my long book The Wizards and the Warriors I was living in London, England. One of the things which helped with the writing of this book was a visit to the Tower of London, an armory containing a vast range of weapons and hunting implements. The actual helped provide the material to flesh out the fictional."

4. Draw a picture (if you're not Picasso then a stick figure picture is okay) or a floor plan or a map. If Jack is married to Mary, then what is the floor plan of their house or apartment? If Jack is in a solitary confinement cell, then what is the floor plan of his solitary confinement cell?

(Question: does the "images" option at www.google.com give access to a range of "solitary confinement" images? Answer: yes, it does ... and, looking at them, the word that comes to mind is "gray" ... grayness, vertical bars ... a kind of bleak and diagramatic life.)

Hugh says:-

"For my ten-volume fantasy series Chronicles of an Age of Darkness I put a lot of effort into making maps. This paid off. The maps fed the fiction and the fiction fed the maps."

Tip: pace out the dimensions of your floor plan.

5. Work hard (even if fruitlessly) then back away from the work and go do something else, like walking, or fishing, or having a hot bath. Something that does not tie up the mind but, rather, leaves it free to wander.

Still stuck? If all else fails, have a look at the writing exercises in the file write ideas.