You've stolen a precious few hours a week for writing, and you're guarding them jealously against the recurring invasions of friends, work, illness, errands, TV, dates and sleeping. You're diligently plugging in your quota, be it a thousand words a day or a hundred. The story is rolling along, the characters revealing their quirks and fears, the plot smoothing over holes.

And yet, it all just gets more difficult. The words start to stick, they sound hollow and forced. Ideas fall flat. Things that looked amazing six months ago are uninspiring, or perhaps worse - cliched. You struggled with what's to come next in a scene, what small crisis to throw a character, how to solve a larger one.

Your experience meter is running dry. Writing isn't just about words - it requres life. The everyday experience of learning, loving, hating, trying, failing - all that jazz. Without it, there's no soul to the story. Your ideas are just copies of the ones before. Because each story you write 'uses up' some experience - a thought you'd been having, a feeling you remember from something. Once you've written about it, it's used up, gone. Writing it again will feel like just that - writing it again.

Even writing this blog, I'm finding this. At the moment, I'm living far more in the world of accounting and finance than writing. It's only short term, but time restraints have chipped away at the time I usually spend on reading, writing, editing, thinking. And I'm feeling it especially when I come to write these posts - I'm running out of experience to draw on, because I'm not doing much in the world I keep blogging about.

So how do you fill your experience meter? Unless you live in a soap opera, everyday life probably won't cut it. Most of us live in lives too structured and repetitive to offer much. Although I make an exception for anyone who works storefront retail - I always met the most bizarre, infuriating and unpredictable characters that way.

There are two 'streams' of experience you need to fill up on. One is story experience - that is, reading everything and anything you can get your hands on. Not just your own genre (although that's important) but other things, even things you think won't interest you. Book clubs, especially small social ones where the books are chosen by the members, can be good for this, as other people's tastes will help break you out of your own prejudices and assumptions.

Don't rely on television or movies for your stories, here. While they have rules of narrative to obey, the medium just isn't capable of the nuance and subtlety of text. I'm not disparaging film, it does some things far better than any novel can, but it has its tradeoffs, and the stories of TV and film are emotional and narrative Big Print. Not terribly useful, and so easy to consume it's very seductive to write it off as writing-grist. It isn't.

The other kind of experience can be broadly categorised as "learning" - try new stuff. Take a class in astrophysics, join a pottery group, start dancing lessons. Teach yourself gardening or French. The idea is to stretch yourself, to feel new things, to think in new ways. When I studied computer science, I was amazed at the different mode of thinking it required - thinking laterally to solve a problem whilst using a logical, methodical framework was totally new. It felt different to think that way. When I moved into commerce and started talking politics and policy, that 'shift' happened again.  Learning new things expands who you are as a person, and therefore a writer.

You can do it solo, but an activity with a group of people is much better. For one thing, we writers tend to be solitary creatures, and bringing more social interaction into our lives is usually a good thing. But the main reason is that writing is about people. Even if you're writing a story about an evil spaceship in a galaxy made of cheese, it's still fundamentally a people-story. Emotions, motivations, longings, fears - that's all people stuff. So not only do you need to expand your own horizons and learn new things, you need to experience new people.

Writers are terrible thieves - we steal stories from everything, from scraps of conversation over coffee, to the vision of the guy smoking four cigarettes at once in his car. If you don't keep putting new people in your path, you'll run out of things to steal. Your characters will start to feel samey, the problems and issues they face repetitive. So - new things, new people.

I'm not advocating starting up five different hobbies right now. Writing time is precious, and I'm well aware that what I'm suggesting will probably come, at least in part, out of that. You need to find what works for you - my usual system is acquiring hobbies. I go to classes and groups, learn about them until I'm relatively competent and then I magically happen to find a new one. It's probably the main reason I have so many craft or visual arts hobbies up my sleeve. Few of them stick around after that - jewellery is a rare exception. But it's not eight things at once - it's a new thing, until the new thing isn't so new anymore. You might prefer to start a short course, or join an adventure club, or just plan a list of achievements and activities you'd like to do. There's no set format.

So - go do something new this week.

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