A shameless variation on Janet Potter’s great idea found here.

WRITERS! 

Are you stuck for an idea?

Do your settings lack oomph?

Could your characters do with a fillip?
Still using the same old phrases?
LOOK NO FURTHER-

the solution is at hand…

Semmelweis – as a boy in 1830.

The best answer I know is in reading:

• Read the books from the charity shop that have been scribbled in.
• Read the artists’ statements beside weird stuff you love and don’t know why. Some are voiced with pretentious twaddle – others with magic.
• Read old guide books to places you can never go.
• Read tacky tourist maps – especially the badly translated. Follow trails and Blue Plaques. Those noticeboards that pigeons crap on.
• Read ghost advertisements on the sides of brick walls. The nicknames of old streets. Half torn down posters. House names and pub signs.
• Read biographies and newspaper announcements – hatches, matches and dispatches. Gravestones and alabaster monuments. Church leaflets and the lists of vicars, bellringers and flower rotas. Notices outside synagogues, mosques, and temples. Amazing names throng places of worship.
• Read entries in historical directories for your town. Two Yeast Importers and three Tripe Dressers in Scarborough 1890 – who knew?
• Read the handwritten ads on the shoe-shop window. Enjoy the rAnDom capital’s and folk punctuation.
• Read pulp fiction and poetry, textbooks and travel writing. Steal unashamedly. Not just fragments of people, and glimpses of places but turns of phrase. And with novels – nick dirty great chunks of plot. If JMW Turner chose to copy Claude and many others to learn – why shouldn’t you?
• Read magazines about interests that aren’t yours. 
• Read vintage catalogues and recipe books, Shell Guides,  Enquire Within and tatty old National Geographics.
• Read without shame – comics and battered Readers Digests, lurid trashy paperbacks that predate you, high-minded difficult stuff you ‘ought’ to have read before, things your friends hate.
• Read again collections of fairy stories and folktales. Seek out urban myths and ‘true’ ghost stories.
• Read Old Bailey trial reports and yellowy newspaper cuttings found as bookmarks.
• Read anything and everything. Question it all.What would you add to my list?