A good way to break up your writing, and to see things in an original way, is to break up your mind. Pretend that you are crazy, and then write from that place. What form will your craziness take?  Are you catatonic, schizophrenic, obsessive compulsive?  When I do this exercise, I almost always imagine myself with multiple personality disorder. Here is a piece I wrote about my 4 other personalities — Ed, Irene, Whinnie and Kinko. (Do not call the men in white coats — I am only pretending!)

I live in the nuthouse, but I'm not alone. I'm not alone because Irene and Ed and Whinnie and Kinko live here with me. I'm in here because you're only supposed to have one person per body. How stingy normal people are! What boring lives they must lead! One personality is not enough, and even my five seems pretty chincy to me at times — I'd like to work up to 9 or 10 — then we could have a baseball team and call each other names like Champ and Bud and Dude.

I know more than any of the other 4, of course, but that's because I'm the bookkeeper and must keep track of everyone. Otherwise they may get lost somewhere out in the dangerous world of hard edges and sharp-toed boots. Ed is the treasurer and he saves the money and sometimes he presides over trials as a judge. No one likes him because he sniffs in a smarmy way. And Irene is fat and sloppy and drinks too much and carries old used Kleenex out to fancy restaurants and leaves them embedded in her mashed potatoes. And Whinnie wears a skimpy beige dress with rips in the hem that shows her skinned knock-knees, and she whines to go home but then when she is home she whines for her bed, and in bed she whines for someone to hold her hand. She is never safe anywhere, and she's right of course, none of us are. And Kinko stays in the shadows — he wears red bulky sweaters and a black slouch hat that shades his face. I don't know much about him except I've never seen his fingers because he keeps his hands balled into fists.

Here we all live in the nuthouse, but this is a good thing because if they let us leave it may be too hard to do my job and keep us all together.