Writing with one hand behind my back . . .

Two strategies to share today for those (like me) with not enough time and not enough stamina to keep that writing project moving ahead:

Kim Switzer's journal cover
for her work in progress

1. Writer's Journal. I've often kept a travel journal for drawing and notes when we're on the road and access to a computer is difficult. But my attempts to start a journal to support a writing project have been less successful. Along comes Kim Switzer this morning with a lovely blog post (with pictures) on keeping a journal for your novel -- complete with character.

2. Formula writing. I no long want to look down on writing by using a formula. I just want to get some words on the page every day. So this morning's read comes from Facebook and a link to
Cynnara Tregarth's blog. She talks about the messy process of writing scenes out of which I mined this:

Book à Chapters. 

Chapters à Scenes. 

Scenes à Micro-scene.

Something happens in the micro-scene (cause), that leads to a series of effects (reactions) -- the character feels something, has a reflexive reaction, a rational action, and then speech.

Thanks to several others on ROW80 (A round of words in 80 days -- "the writing challenge that knows you have a life!"), I feel encouraged to write (even with very limited time and energy), that is to write at least 5 sentences every day and/or for 15 minutes, whichever comes first.

For the last several days, I've been able to write 350 words a day.

That's real progress. 

What do you do when you want to write but the words don't easily fall onto that paper?