[This excerpt appear in slightly different form in the anthology Women Writing On Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing, edited by Carol Smallwood and Suzann Holland.]

Even when life seems too busy to “really” write, you can work on gathering and storing images, details, and reflections about family life, personal experiences and memories. The brief pieces you journal during the busy times in your life are a rich vein of valuable ore integral to future writing. Not only will journaling keep you from lapsing into writer’s block and convincing yourself that you have forgotten how to write, it will help you produce prose poems, sudden fiction, sudden nonfiction, and fragmentary writing, short forms in fashion. As you find more time in your life for writing, you can assay your journal for elements to include in longer projects, and they are reusable. Just because you wrote a poem about something doesn’t mean you can’t write an essay or a story or a novel about it, too.

Five Exercises for Rich Easy-to-Do Journaling That Leads to More Writing

You can use these exercises again and again, and you will create different pieces each time.

* Use Artifacts to Write

Sit in a room, a garden, a yard or in a museum, gallery, cafe gift shop or park. Even your car will do when you are running errands or taking kids to events. Notice  five objects from where you are. Write down their names. Next, whether in that spot or at home, write a passage for each object, selecting from the following menu items (mix it up!):

a. the most important memory that comes to you when you name this object
b. a fantasy you have when you look at the object
c. why you wish this object wasn’t there
d. if you were to name the object after a person who that would be and why
e. what seeing or having this object makes you miss

After you’ve written all the parts, find a title that seems to pull them together–for instance, “What Remains,” “Writing To Find Out,” “Objects,” or “Today”

* Use Recipes to Write

Take a recipe and pair it up with a time in your life. List each ingredient and each direction, and then after each one, write part of a story from your life at the time you associate with the recipe. Alternatively, find a new recipe and write about why you are choosing it today. Then do the exercise of writing between the ingredients and directions using current stories of your life.

* Write Postcards and Letters

Choose a person living or dead with whom you want very much to communicate. Write a series of “post cards” from one place or from several places, over one day, a few days, or a few weeks or months. Describe those places especially for that person. Or write letters to this person–each time imagine you are choosing different printed materials to write on–imagine that you are writing on the backs of things: food labels, checks, visa receipts, take out menus, old letters from someone else, etc. Describe what you are writing on the back of to the person and integrate words from that paper’s other side. If you pretend you are writing on materials other than paper, make sure a description of that material enters into your letter.

* Break Other Writing Apart to Find More to Say

Take a poem you like and break it into stanzas, leaving white space between the stanzas that you will fill in with your own writing. Or take some prose–a shopping or to-do list, a report card, a report, a notice you have received, or a letter you have found, received or sent–and divide the sentences with white space in which you’ll write. What you write will bounce off the lines you’ve taken from the other material. You’ll include descriptions and questions from your life that resonate for you with the writing you have copied out.

* Find Topics to Write About by Making Strange Lists

I like the number seven when I make lists – 7 Things I Think About When I Think About You, 7 Places I May Never See But Feel As If I Have Seen, 7 Places I Would Like You to See, 7 Places I Would Like to See Before I Die, 7 Dresses I’ve Worn Since We Were Married, 7 Dresses I Gave Away, 7 Gifts I’d Give You If I Could, 7 Things That You Have Brought Me, 7 Insults I Take Seriously, 7 Insults I’d Like to Blow Off, 7 Things You’ve Said That I Really Heard, 7 Things I Forgot to Tell You. You get the idea. After you have listed the items in the list you are making, write about each one of the items, remember to use specifics that appeal to the five sense. One or two of the items will interest you more than the others and you may write pages!

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Sources for Reading Short Forms Online

Reading the work on these sites will encourage the idea that what you are putting in your journal is not far from being what editors of short forms like. Each of the following websites has easy to access readings as well as easy online submission processes should you find something in your journal to work on and send in. Part of building that mother lode is building a publication history and it isn’t hard with so many publications looking for material:

A few that are new to me:

One Sentence, An online journal dedicated to fiction and nonfiction stories in one sentence.

Long Story Short, A Magazine for Writers, encouraging writers since 2003.

Midlife Collage, for those 40+

100 Word Story  — “None of us will ever know the whole story in other  words. We can only collect a bag full of shards that each seem perfect.” — from the website.

Top Ten Literary Magazines to Send Your Best Flash Fiction –Remember, flash nonfiction is often marketed as fiction but not the other way around.

And A few that I’ve admired for awhile:

Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative’s Flash in the Pan, which posts short, often poetic, pieces of prose that soar.

Frag Lit, An online magazine of fragmentary writing devoted to publishing journal entries among other forms

Brevity, A journal of nonfiction Rich pieces in 750 words or less

Flash Fiction Online, A source of short, short stories.

Narrative Magazine offers traditional short stories as well as other forms of literature, including iStories, a very short form.

Write, read, write some more. Send some pieces out for publication. You will be creating the mother lode and teaching yourself how to stay engaged in the writer’s life.