1. Make friends.
What I learned from my favorite professor in college is that "A writer needs friends." not because of the adage that a man is not an island but because you need friends to make you live your life outside of the confines of your own home.
Good friends make the best heroines. Bad friends or people who hurt you make the best villains.
2. People watch as often as you can.
This is probably the most lucrative way for a newb to get inspiration. If you are in the mall or just in the park, absorb while you observe. Best way to do this? Wear earphones but don't plug it into a device or if you do, don't play any music. You have now a pretend barrier and people can now freely do whatever they want and believe me you will pick up some awesome chatter.
3. Learn something new everyday and acknowledge it.
In the world where GOOGLE exists, people tend to be lax when it comes to learning new things. As a writer you don't have the luxury of being stagnant. Even if you can read blogs and google just about everything you need to place on your novel, the bottom line is that feeling would be missing.
4. Experience is the best teacher.
Do not be afraid to love and to explore your feelings. If you are not able to acknowledge your own feelings, how can you explain it to others? How would you be able to paint a picture of a place that you have never been to but already exists. So travel as much as you can, make a lot of memories and draw from there the settings of your work and the people in your life can be pieces of the people that you write about.
5. Acknowledge REAL LOVE when you see it.
I am sure there are people out there or in your life who can show you or you can talk to about this. It could be an older person or even an elderly person. Ask them for advice about how to find true love and perhaps stories of how love cam in their lives. Based on a true story may not be that old, but it's great to know that REAL and TRUE LOVE exists in the world. And that inspiration, more than anything would help you. Mine are my parents. Best love story ever, going strong 27 years too. ^.^
6. Read other styles and genre.
If you are stuck in the Romance genre, you would start getting stagnant and just like water, it breeds all sorts of things and starts to...stink. So think of your love for writing as water and your genre as a tiny tributary that leads to a river that leads to the sea to an ocean. If you keep your water in just one place and it never flows to meet other bodies of water then eventually it would dry up. Surely it would find it's way back to the ocean as rain but it would never flow back to where it was in the first place.
7. Filter your media.
As much as the world is full of posts, comments and links, you don't have to see everyone of them. If you are full of stimuli your brain would be blotted and won't have enough time to process everything. You might end up with a social networking addiction that would cut time for your writing. As much as maybe a writing group would help, writing time should not be FB or (insert later social network that is booming) time either.
8. FACETIME with other homo sapiens.
To help you make believable dialogues and know the way people do talk then you need to listen to them, interact and actually figure out that there are new "words" and trends that are out there.
9. Read more literary books and ingest a lot of poems.
10. Fall in love and fall out of love.
