How to take a writing break … without breaking up with writing.

Ten tips to ensure that your time out isn’t forever.

Every writer hits a wall. The difference between a productive pause and a permanent stall usually isn’t willpower — it’s structure. Here are ten ways to look away from your screen* without losing your grip on the work entirely.

1. Schedule the break the way you schedule your deadlines
The risk of taking an open-ended “I’ll come back when I feel like it” break is that it might never end. Give it a timelinet — two weeks, a month, whatever fits — and put the end date somewhere you’ll actually see it: a calendar reminder, a sticky note on the monitor. A break with an end date is a pause. A break without one is an exit.

2. Leave yourself a trail back in
Before you close the laptop, write a two- or three-sentence note: where the story is, what the next scene needs to do, what you were stuck on. Future-you, cold and out of practice, will thank present-you for not making them re-read forty pages just to remember the plot.

3. Separate “not writing” from “not thinking about writing”
You can’t fully turn off the part of your brain that’s been living in this project for months, and trying to force it usually backfires. Let ideas surface without acting on them — jot a one-line note if something strikes you, then let it go. The goal is rest from the labor, not amnesia about the work.

4. Protect the identity, not just the habit
A break can quietly curdle into “I used to write” if you let it. Keep one small, low-stakes thread alive — reading in your genre, a five-minute journal entry, anything that keeps “writer” as a thing you are rather than a thing you did. If you nurture your identity as a writer, you’ll find it easier to get going when the time comes.

5. Pick a re-entry ritual before you need one
Decide in advance what “coming back” looks like: reread the last chapter, do one hour of research, free-write for ten minutes with no goal. Deciding this while you’re still fresh means you’re not facing a blank page and a blank plan on day one back.

6. Tell someone your return date
A break kept entirely private is easy to quietly extend. Tell a writing partner, an editor, a friend (I used my newsletter to tell everyone) — anyone who’ll ask “so, back at it?” on roughly the right week. External accountability does a lot of the work your own willpower won’t.

7. Notice what kind of tired you actually are
Burnout, boredom, and genuine creative depletion call for different remedies. Boredom might just need a new project to alternate with. Burnout needs actual rest — sleep, time away from screens, no writing-adjacent guilt. Mistaking one for the other is how a two-week break turns into a two-year hiatus.

8. Use your non-writing tools to keep you toned
Keep doing all the things that were part of your daily writing routine. Meditation, journaling: I learned the power of writing daily pages (or even just haf a page) from The Artist’s Way. It’s like going into the gym and working out with bodyweight or bands, rather than heavy metal. And keep reading: reading is learning, after all.

9. Set a floor, not a ceiling, for re-entry
Don’t expect to come back like Stephen King and write 2000 words on day one. Set yourself a low bar. For me, it’s just five minutes, so the bar for “I’m back” is one I’ll actually clear. Momentum builds from cleared bars, not missed ones.

10. Forgive the version of you that needed the break
Don’t feel guilty for taking a break. Guilt has a tendency to spiral, and it could turn your time out into a failure complex. If your first week back feels rusty, that’s not proof the break was a mistake — it’s proof you’re human.

* I so wanted to write ‘put down the pen’, but it’s not 1984 any more