Even when you can't find the time to sit with your fingers on the keyboard or with pen in hand, you can be developing writing. Here are two exercises you can use.

1. Make up similes just for the fun of it so your brain is always "refreshing experience" and being lively. See, hear, taste, touch or smell something and challenge yourself to say what it is like, with specificity and originality.

For example, when I look at my sandals I think, "The two straps over the top of my foot look like...." I realize the answer is, "highway overpasses." On a slightly windy day I say, "Leaves rustling in the breeze sound like...." I fill in the rest of the simile: "my grandson's breathing when he is building with blocks." When I taste soybeans I've boiled, I think, "A boiled soybean tastes like...." I find a comparison, "A boiled soybean tastes like the stick from an ice cream bar after you've licked it clean." I touch a piece of fine grade sandpaper and challenge myself: "Fine grade sandpaper feels like...." It isn't long before I realize it feels like the skin of a strawberry or starfish. And when I smell old bean salad still in my refrigerator, I realize it smells like my fingers after a day of beach combing.

One thing is always like another thing and when I can put together things from different landscapes to explain my experience I am exercising my writing muscle.

2. Take a snippet of conversation you hear and think about what you'd write if you started off with that snippet. Today, a friend of mine responded to my comment about how easily we shop together with these words, "Yes, our dangerous friendship." I liked the phrase "our dangerous friendship." What would I write if I started there? About two women who decide to go on adventure vacations, each one with escalating risk? Two women who each help the other stick to what they say they want?

Today, a visitor to my house said, "You have lots of color on your counter. That's what I like." A sales woman said she had the same socks that I was buying. "I've washed them and they feel good." A clerk at a deli said of their shelf of locally made cheese, jams and crackers, "Everything there is good."

What would happen if I began a piece of writing with any one of these statements? I could write a poem that is a litany of what is on my counter and why it is there. I could write about things that come out of the dryer and what they feel like. I could write poem about everything is good--and include all kinds of images from my life as I see them in this moment, through this lens.

Without having to put anything aside, I am already writing. And it won't be long before I find the minutes, even the hours, for making what I am thinking a story, an essay, or a poem.