Forgetting how to write.

[Kaboom]

Once upon a time I wrote every day. Back then, prose seemed to radiate from my fingertips. Now I'm lucky if I can churn out one or two sentences that are competently written.

I haven't written in years. Now it feels like I'm starting from square one all over again. Anyone have a lull in their writing and find that they're able to "reclaim" that spark they lost?

 

[pdblake]

I stopped writing in earnest after my daughter and wife died 12 and 13 years ago. I didn't write much of anything for five years or so.

Currently I'm writing 1k+ words a day, submitting to agents and magazines alike, so yes, you can get it back. I found the arse-in-seat method works best for me.

 

[Mfraser]

Oh yes. I wrote consistently for years, felt pretty good about my writing on several metrics. But life and its changes and challenges (covid, kids, international move were the big ones) meant a multi-year pause. It took months for me to start writing regularly once I started up again. It felt hard, unnatural, everything I wrote seemed crappy. But now I'm writing sentences I like, finished up and am editing novel #4, and I like the shape of it.

Here are some of the things that helped (but bear in mind, it took months to get the engine really going, I'm not exaggerating. Probably more like a year):

• Reading more, with a focus on pure enjoyment
• Starting and discarding short stories. I'd write a page then abandon it. Start another story, abandon after two pages. I have a large folder of abandoned shorts that may never go anywhere.
• Sit down and write daily, either a word goal or a time goal or a combo (i.e., write in 20min spurts until 250 words are done. Pomodoro timers are nice for this). Keep the goal(s) small, though, to start.
• Don't go back and read what you wrote (unless you really feel like it, I guess)

It's like... re-awakening atrophied writing muscles, if that makes sense. They're still there, they just need to be brought back online. (Mixed metaphor alert.) Think about something you feel like writing about right now and make yourself do some work for a bit, but don't think about quality and don't think about productivity. Don't think about the writer you "used to be".

I felt like I was starting from square one as well. But once I'd given myself time to mess around and find the joy in writing for its own sake, I feel like I did get back to where I once was and am continuing on from there, if that makes sense.

@pdblake 's "arse in seat" comment is the tl;dr of this post...

 

[Sage]

I'm just coming back from a long break from consistent writing. I'd have spurts here or there for the past few years, but had trouble committing or finding it anything but a chore.

Way back in the day, I wrote a novel that flowed out of me so easily. I loved it so much (and still do). But after I wrote that, I went for a year where everything else I tried to write felt like pulling teeth. I could sit down and put words on the screen, but I hated them and it was difficult to put them there. I was too much in my head about what was "publishable." Even when I told myself it was a first draft and it was allowed to suck, I still just couldn't get out of the mindset.

To get myself out of my head, I planned a book that I knew I wouldn't be submitting to agents (I had been told nobody would take on a Christmas book). I got a cabin with a writer friend for three days, and we set a crazy writing goal during the getaway. I'm sort of a plotster, that I usually have beats that I'm aiming for in the form of a music playlist that I can change around or drop songs from if they aren't working, but I don't outline. In this case, I had twelve plot points that I had to hit, so if I got stuck during that , I just aimed for one of them. Because I changed up how I was writing and what the goals were, I was able to get out of my head, which opened the door to getting back into the groove of things and writing books that I was hoping to publish again.

I think that's sort of where I am now. The stuff I've been writing for the past month has been stories that I don't intend to publish anywhere. Getting back into practice of writing and finding a time and place that is comfortable to me to do so has been a big part of my momentum lately. I'm hoping that it translates to novel writing when I get inspired for a longer work.

 

[soapdish]

I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot, having gone through (and still working on) the same thing.

For me, I think what has been really helpful (other than the other tips people have mentioned so far, which I also totally concur) is listening to author interviews. Particularly ones who write in my genre. But even those outside the genre.

It helps me remember what gets me excited about writing when I feel like I can’t even remember anymore.

Listening to authors with new books coming out talk about their inspiration and process.

Authors talking about their origins—which sometimes are so similar to mine that I think, “yes! This is me. I am a writer just like this guy!” But also are sometimes so dissimilar that I marvel at the perspectives and experiences that bring different writer’s to the craft, and THAT energizes me.

Hearing other authors talk about their process produces a similar effect. If they do it just like me, I feel affirmed that I am in deed a writer, even if the words are slow to come lately. If they approach writing totally different than me I get energized to try their ways and see what happens. (I don’t always follow through with trying their ways, that’s not actually the point. The point is it generates a little spark and the goal is to keep that spark flowing long enough to create a flame.)

I find podcasts are the easiest way for me to absorb all this. I can listen to them any time I’m doing other things—driving, cleaning, relaxing.

I wish you luck on your journey to finding your way back You are obviously not alone. And it’s great to get others talking about their struggles too. Hopefully we can help each other.

 

[gettingby]

It was probably a decade or so ago that I quit writing. A lot was going on, and writing just didn't seem like something I wanted to do or would want to do ever again. The reasons I stopped writing had nothing to do with actually writing, but, still, I thought I was done. Two things brought me back to writing.

The first thing was reading. I started reading a lot. If an effort to get mail (kind of ) I started subscribing to a bunch of literary journals and magazines. I all of a sudden had nothing but free time, really. And I thought by reading these publications I had a front seat to the newest fiction being put out. After a few months of reading a crazy amount of short stories (plus a few novels), a rough idea of my own sort of formed. It was nothing more than a what-if scenario. I didn't plan out a story or even know if I could really write one. But I took my idea and started to write.

The story was a bit of a mess, though, I tried my best even through revision. It wasn't at the level of works being published, but I suddenly wanted to write at that level. However, I had written a story, and this made me want to write more. I wasn't thinking about publishing. I just wanted to write at that level. So, I took an online fiction writing class. That helped because there were instructions and deadlines.

The second thing that brought me back to writing was actually this site. It was back when W1S1 was more popular and a lot of people were doing it as a weekly challenge. That's when I started writing a short story every week. And I think the main reason or the only reason I was submitting anything was because it was part of the challenge. I love a challenge.

I did it for a year, writing 52 stories. Most of them weren't that good. I didn't sell anything that year. However, I think it was around week 20 where I started to notice a difference in my writing. My stories were getting better. My writing was getting better. The challenge definitely fast tracked that. It could have taken me years to write 20 stories. Instead, it took months. And once I could see a real change in my writing, it fueled me even more to keep writing.

I think everyone at W1S1 does it on a monthly basis now, but I still think it could be a could thing even if only for practice writing. Or go ahead and try writing a short story a week for a year. I think anyone who does that will just become a better writer (and start writing again) because of it.

No matter how you decide to get back into writing, keep in mind it's okay to be a little rusty at first. That's a given. I don't know if you're a planner or a pantser, but I suggest going with pantsing as you slip back into it. It can be a lot of fun to make things up on the fly. I would (and still do) often think of the craziest situation I could and then run with it.

One way or another, I think, writers find their way back to the craft regardless of how much time they stay away from it. Good luck, my friend.

 

[buz]

I did stop writing for a while. Then I started again.

When I started back up again it did not feel like it did before. I don't feel as though I reclaimed anything or gained anything back; more...just...started over. How I wrote this book is not how I wrote before. How I'm planning to write the next one is not how I wrote this one. I don't know if it will get written or not. I don't really know anything.

...In any case...I don't know if what works for me ever will work for anyone else. But I suppose you might try thinking of it less as trying to re-tread the same ground you trod before, but more as starting again new. And...I think it also helped me tremendously to regard it as something just for fun and my own personal amusement, but I know everyone's situation varies there, just mentioning it...

If none of that helps you, forget all that

 

[Infinimata]

From roughly 1993 through 1997 I wrote three novel length manuscripts. Then a bunch of stuff happened I won't go into here, and upshot is for around ten years I produced basically nothing. I had no ideas, no sense of what to do. Then in 2006 or so I sat down and did NaNoWriMo, and it was like blowing open a vault. Everything came spilling out -- not just ideas but methodologies (a big part of NNWM was about forming and keeping habits), and it's been more or less non-stop since.

Those three books I wrote before, by the way -- the first one is gone, and the other two aren't very good. But they got me where I am now, so they must have been good for something.

 

[Nether]

I also had to "butt in seat" for a long while to get into the swing of things... and technically much of my writing, editing, etc, is still "butt in seat" because otherwise my lazy ass wouldn't get much done.

The first few days (if not weeks) were a lot of, "How does this even work?" It was basically relearning at that point, but more from trying to practice it. I was still making good progress on an hourly basis, though... despite not always (in fact kinda rarely) doing a full hour for much of the early going. Even toward the end of that manuscript, it wasn't always an hour a day, so I wasn't even always clearing 1k words. I got better about it as the second manuscript went on and started to hit my stride with the third, until that fourth one clocked in at 94k words in 31 days. After that, it was off to the races for a bit. And then 88k words in 19 days. After that... well, nothing was quite as fast, but I was still going pretty strong for a while. My best 12 consecutive months wound up being 1.1m words.

 

[JudiH]

It occurs to me that this threat should be retitled: "Remembering how to write." You feel like you've forgotten, but it's still there. You just have to remember how to access it.

And the best way, as others have said, is to write. Make time to write every day. Steering the Craft, by Ursula K. LeGuin, was recommended to me by an AW-er (and I apologize for not remembering who it was). It's a kind of how-to workbook based on workshops she used to lead, and has writing exercises at the end of each chapter. Maybe you could find a copy of that, or something similar, and do an exercise every day.

 

[Clovitide]

This is an encouraging thread! I haven't been in the game (alive) long enough to really have big stints of no writing. I do wonder about when/if I'll ever stop writing for a bit (then of course jump back into it because what will I do if I'm not writing??). Though, From 16 onward, I've written pretty frequently. Snippets of story ideas and such, even during tough moments, during basic training with a spiral notebook, or later with my phone. Or during two deployment with horrendous 13-14 hour days, I fit in some writing time. I'm sure I've gone months with nothing written.

When I do have to take a break writing, when I come back into it, I always think I'm better for it because what ever made me take that break usually changed me as a person, and now my experiences are more enriched, and hopefully my writing will be too.

 

[Kaboom]

I stopped writing in earnest after my daughter and wife died 12 and 13 years ago. I didn't write much of anything for five years or so.

Currently I'm writing 1k+ words a day, submitting to agents and magazines alike, so yes, you can get it back. I found the arse-in-seat method works best for me.

I'm sorry that you had this experience, but I'm grateful that you found the ability to write again.

 

[Kaboom]

Oh yes. I wrote consistently for years, felt pretty good about my writing on several metrics. But life and its changes and challenges (covid, kids, international move were the big ones) meant a multi-year pause. It took months for me to start writing regularly once I started up again. It felt hard, unnatural, everything I wrote seemed crappy. But now I'm writing sentences I like, finished up and am editing novel #4, and I like the shape of it.

Here are some of the things that helped (but bear in mind, it took months to get the engine really going, I'm not exaggerating. Probably more like a year):

• Reading more, with a focus on pure enjoyment
• Starting and discarding short stories. I'd write a page then abandon it. Start another story, abandon after two pages. I have a large folder of abandoned shorts that may never go anywhere.
• Sit down and write daily, either a word goal or a time goal or a combo (i.e., write in 20min spurts until 250 words are done. Pomodoro timers are nice for this). Keep the goal(s) small, though, to start.
• Don't go back and read what you wrote (unless you really feel like it, I guess)

It's like... re-awakening atrophied writing muscles, if that makes sense. They're still there, they just need to be brought back online. (Mixed metaphor alert.) Think about something you feel like writing about right now and make yourself do some work for a bit, but don't think about quality and don't think about productivity. Don't think about the writer you "used to be".

I felt like I was starting from square one as well. But once I'd given myself time to mess around and find the joy in writing for its own sake, I feel like I did get back to where I once was and am continuing on from there, if that makes sense.

@pdblake 's "arse in seat" comment is the tl;dr of this post...

This is great advice! I too am starting with "Reading more." I'm not writing, but I am reading again--right now I want to expose myself to language, all of its nuances, and get the feel again for what great prose reads like.

 

[Kaboom]

I'm just coming back from a long break from consistent writing. I'd have spurts here or there for the past few years, but had trouble committing or finding it anything but a chore.

Way back in the day, I wrote a novel that flowed out of me so easily. I loved it so much (and still do). But after I wrote that, I went for a year where everything else I tried to write felt like pulling teeth. I could sit down and put words on the screen, but I hated them and it was difficult to put them there. I was too much in my head about what was "publishable." Even when I told myself it was a first draft and it was allowed to suck, I still just couldn't get out of the mindset.

To get myself out of my head, I planned a book that I knew I wouldn't be submitting to agents (I had been told nobody would take on a Christmas book). I got a cabin with a writer friend for three days, and we set a crazy writing goal during the getaway. I'm sort of a plotster, that I usually have beats that I'm aiming for in the form of a music playlist that I can change around or drop songs from if they aren't working, but I don't outline. In this case, I had twelve plot points that I had to hit, so if I got stuck during that , I just aimed for one of them. Because I changed up how I was writing and what the goals were, I was able to get out of my head, which opened the door to getting back into the groove of things and writing books that I was hoping to publish again.

I think that's sort of where I am now. The stuff I've been writing for the past month has been stories that I don't intend to publish anywhere. Getting back into practice of writing and finding a time and place that is comfortable to me to do so has been a big part of my momentum lately. I'm hoping that it translates to novel writing when I get inspired for a longer work.

It sounds like you're finding success in writing for the pure joy, the necessity of it, vs. what is salable. That's the mindset I'm trying to get to right now. I want to be comfortable writing terrible sentences. I'm looking for volume right now, habit, consistency -- not perfection.

 

[Savant99]

One of the things that hung me up in my early writing days was getting stuck writing in a linear fashion. (IOW, starting with 'once upon a time' and writing until 'they lived happily every after' kind of thing.)

In the here and now, I just write scenes. I don't care where in the story they are located, if it's in my head, I get it out.

Over a decade ago I realized how much I was hamstringing myself, when I started writing a story with a great scene. However, the scene was actually the penultimate scene in the story. But I still started with the scene, and then tried to write the rest of the story as a flashback. As you can imagine, it was brutal to write, and I didn't get far.

So instead, I just imagined the story in my mind, and then grabbed whatever scene came into my head. It didn't matter where the scene was, or whether it would 'fit' the final product. We spend WAY more time editing/revising than we do writing, so it can always be touched up later. With that penultimate scene written, I then tried to imagine what would/could get the protagonist to that point. Things started to flow, and I was able to get the bulk of it written before I needed to go back and start moving things around and/or refining sections. Hey, it's always better to have too much material than too little. A good editor can trim down a bloated story, but they can't pump up one that is lacking.

Ultimately, what I found helped the most was writing about a main protagonist that I could relate with. I started to put myself in their head, and write from that perspective. In a way, it worked almost too well, since I had friends and family (who read the completed story) ask me if the story really happened to me—which it did not. But the fact that it seemed so 'real' to them helped to make it a good read.

In the end, I tell people not to worry about proper syntax or sentence structure etc. That can all be fixed later. There is nothing that will suck the joy out of writing faster than being obsessively concerned with *how* you are writing. Which reminds me of a phrase I coined many years ago...

A boring story, impeccably written, is still a boring story.

 

[darrtwish]

One of the things that hung me up in my early writing days was getting stuck writing in a linear fashion. (IOW, starting with 'once upon a time' and writing until 'they lived happily every after' kind of thing.)

In the here and now, I just write scenes. I don't care where in the story they are located, if it's in my head, I get it out.

This is what has helped me the most, honestly. Especially coming back to writing, where I hadn't written anything outside of research papers (not even fanfiction) in over a decade. I find its a completely different process now -- maybe it's because I am at a different stage of life, or something else has fundamentally shifted. Now, I pretty much operate on 'let it be ugly', 'butt in chair' and 'timelines are for revisions.'

I do a pretty good of shutting off, too. I used to wait for inspiration, and try to force myself to think about characters/plot while not writing, but it just doesn't work for me anymore. Maybe it's the hundreds of papers I wrote in university & college, but writing for me has very much become a task that I sit down and do. I work on it, until I'm at a stopping point for the day, and then I'm done.

 

[gettingby]

I think writing is a lot easier than editing and revision. The idea that you can just fix everything later, I believe actually makes things harder. Revision is always going to be a necessary part of the writing process. A first draft is never going to be a final draft. But the whole idea of just writing scenes seems troublesome to me. The idea of having all the scenes that you will later put into story and plot form seems like a very hard puzzle where all the pieces just might not fit together.

Sticking to a story structure is hard. I'm all about writers being experimental when it comes to structure. But at the end of the day, the structure is what delivers the story. I'm a complete pantser. Maybe that's why I write my stories in order. I follow the story as I write the story. If you just write scenes and then try to make a story out of it later, I think that could easily become a very daunting task and in the end just might not work.

I guess if you're working off an outline writing scenes and writing out of order might not create such a mess. But I still believe maintaining the voice and flow of events might not be as smooth. I think I just don't see any real benefit of skipping around to just write scenes rather than actually write the story. A story is much easier to work on during revision than scenes that you hope make up a story.

Writing is writing. I say do whatever you need to do to get back into it. But at some point you have to remember that writers write stories which is a lot more than writing scenes. A lot of what helped me get back to writing was writing stories with a beginning, middle, and end. That's also something that needs practice as much as just writing, especially just writing scenes.

Just my thoughts on this from the perspective of getting back to writing.

 

[MajWrites]

I echo much of the advice others have shared: BIC, allow yourself to write poorly, start wherever feels right (be it the beginning or the end), and so on. This isn't a test.

Forgetting how to write is one of my fears. I've always found interest in most things, tried every sport, dabbled in every hobby, but writing has stuck with me like nothing else. Yet, as with all my other pursuits, the inevitable dip eventually comes. Typically, that signals it's time for me to move on to a new obsession. But it's been over a year now, and writing is different. I love it. I'm improving with every poor sentence I manage to put down.

Still, the thought of "the dip" lingers in the back of my mind. Especially lately, as my writing has slowed to a grinding halt; zero words a day for quite some time now, especially after finishing my first draft. Yet, the spark remains. My ideas continue to float around. I keep reading as much as I can, trusting that I’ll return to the page when I've had a small break and feel ready.

What I’m trying to say with this little ramble is that what you’ve written here is a clear sign of life in your writing—it’s breathing! With time, you’ll catch your breath again.