Beth Camp Historical Fiction

Friday, August 02, 2013

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?

3 comments:

  1. Love this, thanks for sharing Kim's guest post! I always love seeing you here, there and everywhere. :D

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  2. Congrats on the your daily word count. It's nice to find something that works.

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  3. Thanks for commenting. My days are spent now with Rachel (immobilized for three months with a broken ankle), and chasing 13-month-old Leda, a totally adorable grandchild. I'm comforted by this community of writers and will persevere!

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