The last time I sat down to write this blog it was the height of Summer. I was wearing shorts and everything smelled of sunscreen. Now, I’m already in my cosy jumpers and dusting off the slow cooker. It’s been a while since I last wrote …

I knew I wouldn’t be able to dedicate much time to writing over the Summer. The children were off school, there were deaths and births and more pressures on everyday family life so I allowed myself to take a natural break. Rather than feel sad about the lost writing time I decided to look upon this as merely a pause, the kind that we all need to take sometimes. A friend said to me recently, “We have to take the breaks when they come so that we don’t break.” It has quickly become one of my favourite sayings.

Taking a break from your writing is nothing to apologise for. If you know you have a busy or stressful time coming up, it’s sensible to adapt your routine.

I sometimes worry  that we as a society  have become afraid to take a break, to stop and breathe. But breath is life, breath can re-centre and refocus us. Don’t be afraid to simply breathe. 

I allowed myself to breathe over the summer, to enjoy my children, with slow play and simple days but now, I’m ready to start writing again. All around me the autumn season is snuggling down for the cold season to come but I am waking up.

However, it isn’t easy. I can feel the rusty joints of my brain creaking and complaining as I attempt to get them working again. Writing  and creativity is a muscle, the more you use it the stronger it gets and just like any muscle that you stop using, it takes practice to get the strength back.  

So how do we return to writing after taking a break? How do we get our groove back? I’ve asked myself this a lot recently and here’s what I’ve come up with – I hope you find it useful too!

1. Be Gentle With Yourself 

If you were a runner and you took a break after straining your ankle you wouldn’t expect yourself to get back to full stamina straight away, so why do we demand the same of our creativity? Your ideas are still there, they just might need a little more time to form. Your creativity might have lost its stamina but with a bit of gentle exercise, you will get it back. So while you’re working your muscles and building back  to full strength, be gentle with yourself, don’t expect to be able to run a marathon straight away. 

2. Read

I find the best way to fall back into writing is to fall back into reading. Find a story that you love and allow yourself to be immersed in it, get inspired and excited, remind yourself why you love words. If you don’t know what to write, then read. If you don’t know what to read then pay a visit to your local bookshop or library and ask them for a recommendation. Book people love to recommend books and you never know, you might find your next favourite story. 

3. Create a Simple Routine

Your brain will need rules if it’s to get back to writing so make yourself a simple, easy to do list. Start small. Don’t feel like you need to play catch up – it’s important that your writing tasks are non threatening and easy to achieve at the beginning. The idea is to re-introduce yourself to regular writing, to make it an inviting task and not a chore. How you do that will look different to everyone depending on what you need but here are some ideas and examples to get you started. 

• Write one sentence 
• Write down a writing prompt 
• Reread something you wrote before you took your break 
• Edit one paragraph 
• Free write for two minutes
• Journal or draw 
• Sit and do nothing for five minutes. No phone, no book, no tv or music. Just sit and think about anything. Or nothing. For five minutes. 

These steps are enough. Think of them as light weights in the gym, to practise lifting. They are simple for a reason. 

4. Motivation and Reward

No, you’re not treating yourself like a dog, you are working with the cause and effect response designed by your very clever brain. When you get something nice after completing a task, your brain will want to do that task again. A cup of tea, a biscuit, reading a chapter of your favourite book, or just having a rest are all simple ways of incentivising your brain and keeping you on track. You don’t have to go on rewarding yourself forever but at the start, it’s a good way to keep you motivated.

5. Tell Your Inner Critic To Be Quiet

The voice of the inner critic is the biggest killer of creativity. There’s nothing like you, for getting in your own way is there? Which is a shame because your inner critic, if used carefully, can be an excellent writing tool. The inner critic can be incredibly useful when it comes to editing, for getting things right, for tidying things up and being exact. That’s because your inner critic is the bossy sensible grown up in your brain. They are there to keep you clean and tidy and follow the rules. Inner critics are great at tidying up a manuscript but they are total pants at creating one. That’s because your creativity, the bit of your brain that comes up with the ideas and doesn’t care about rules, is a child. Creativity wants to run through the woods with scabby knees, and shriek at the sky and never ever wash its face. Your Inner Critic makes sure the game has rules and makes sense but your creative child ensures that there is a fun game to play in the first place. So, for now, your inner critic isn’t invited to any of your playdates. Let your creativity be a wild thing, let them make up nonsense, let them run and  jump and fly and play. Your inner critic and go take a nap.

So, this is my plan for September and I am excited. After a rest we often find ourselves changed so what kind of writing will I return to? What sort of ideas can my newly rested brain come up with? How does my creative child see the world now? What games do they want to play? They say a rest is as good as  a feast but I am hungry for the page. The world is getting ready for hibernation but I am ready to remerge and, I hope, you are too.

So, be gentle with yourself, do not censor yourself. Reward yourself, inspire yourself and, most of all, allow yourself to be yourself. After all, there’s no one who can write quite like you. 

I was procrastinating the other day.

 I told myself it was research but …. I can be honest with you …right? 

OK ….  It was procrastination. 

One of my current favourite ways to avoid actually writing is to google other writers.

 I’m exceptionally nosey. 

No, not even that, I am fascinated, gripped, obsessed with other writers and their routines. Maybe because writing can be such a lonely and solitary activity, I find myself craving the company and reassurance of how other writers work. How do they like to do it? For how long?  Where? When, and with what tools? 

On this day, I had just spent a particularly difficult hour, trying to chisel out a new chapter, one painful word at a time. In need of some reassurance (or possibly a stick to beat myself with) I found myself  googling “famous authors daily word count.” 

I got to wondering “how many words should I be writing a day?”

And that’s a very dangerous word. 

“Should.” 

It is so easy to fall into the belief that we should be doing things a certain way for them to have value. 

I should be writing this many words.

I should be writing for this amount of time.

I should be published by this age. 

I should write about a particular genre/style/subject. 

etc etc. 

Should is a bitter-taste-whip- crack-across-the-face, sort of word. I fall into the Should trap all. Of. The. Time. I wish I didn’t and I don’t want anyone else to either. 

I don’t want anyone to feel like they should be doing anything at all. We all have our own way of doing things and the only thing you need to consider is, is it working for you? 

BUT, like I said, I am very very nosey and so I continued googling anyway and, once I stopped comparing myself to other writers something magical happened. 

I was able to enjoy sharing these different routines and habits without feeling threatened by them. Even if they were intimidating, or high brow or unachievable for my own lifestyle. Even if that writer’s habits were very different from my own – especially if they were very different – it didn’t matter. It was just … interesting.  I simply enjoyed peering into their lives in a way that made me feel part of a larger community. 

We are all different writers with different styles and techniques, but we are all writers. We understand this process, how it feels, the highs, the lows and what it requires from us to achieve a finished piece of work. It made me feel seen and understood and no longer lonely on a difficult writing day. And that’s something that we should* allow ourselves to feel more often. 

*OK maybe it’s not always such a bad word. 

Stephen King’s daily word count: 1,000 words

Stephen King’s daily writing routine has slowed as the years have gone by however he remains committed to writing daily, even on weekends. He says, “I used to write more and I used to write faster – it’s just ageing. It slows you down a little bit.” In the past, he would generate 2,000 words per day, but now he dedicates four hours to writing and achieves approximately 1,000 words.

Margaret Atwood’s daily word count: 1,000 to 2,000 words

Margaret Atwood  starts working at 10am, aiming for 1,000 to 2,000 words per day and she  tries to wrap up her work by 4pm but will work into the evening if her writing is going particularly well. “I’d get up in the morning, have breakfast, have coffee, then go upstairs to the room where I write, I’d sit down and probably start transcribing from what I’d handwritten the day before.” 

Lee Child’s daily word count: 2,000 words

Lee Child says he aims to write 2,000 words a day, though this can vary. “Some days I write just a couple hundred words, but it’s crucial I feel pleased about it. There are so many invisible things – setting up mood, prefacing a transition. But routine narrative, I’ll write 2,000 words a day.”

Kazuo Ishiguro’s daily word count: 5 to 6 pages

Kazuo Ishiguro doesn’t write every day, but when he does, he aims for 5-6 pages per day — any more than that and he feels the quality of his writing becomes substandard. “It’s like a jazz musician who gets the best music out and then pulls out. There’s always something else productive or administrative to be done.”

Salman Rushdie’s daily word count: 400 to 500 words

Salman Rushdie says he used to write more when he was younger however it also needed more revising. As he’s got older he says he writes less but the work also needs less reworking afterwards. “I used to get a lot more written in a day than I do now—four pages, five pages. Now I’m doing 400 or 500 words. The difference is that the work used to need a lot of revision. Now I write much less, but it’s closer to a finished piece.”

Sebastian Faulks: 1,000 Words

Faulks believes in consistency when working. “When I am writing a book I write from ten till six everyday in a small office near my house,” he says. “I never write less than a 1000 words a day

Maya Angelou Words 2500

Maya Angelou keeps a hotel room in her hometown and pays for it by the month. She goes in around 6:30 in the morning and asks the management and housekeeping not to enter the room. She’s never slept there and  usually leaves by 2pm. She then goes home, reads what she’s written in the morning, then works on editing. “I write five or six days a week, usually a minimum of 2000 words, sometimes more. 2000 words can take anywhere from three to eight hours.”

Neil Gaiman Words 1500

Neil Gaiman says he’ll start writing around 1pm and stop around 6pm. He writes longhand, with pen and ink which allows him to get the words out, without the temptation to edit as he writes. Then, as he copies the longhand words into the computer, he starts editing. He says when writing he only gives himself 2 options, 

“You can sit here and write, or you can sit here and do nothing. But you can’t sit here and do anything else. A good day is defined by anything more than 1,500 words of comfortable, easy writing that I figure I’m probably going to use most of in the end. Occasionally, you have those magical days when you look up and you’ve done 4,000 words, but they’re more than balanced out by those evil days where you manage 150 words you know you’ll be throwing away.”

So what’s your preferred way of writing? Do you have a daily writing count, set amount of time or pages to aim for? Do you write in the branches of a tree? Upside down on your bed or at the kitchen table? However you do it, I hope it gives you joy and if it’s working for you then it’s the perfect routine for you. Good luck and happy writing!