By Kris Maze

I have never had a writing hiatus like my current one. This break started after the last legs of my latest book launch walked off into the sunset. It has since taken up residence in my writer mind. It has been several months since I have crafted a blog post, reflected in a journal entry, or written a story. 

Other than this post, of course. You, dear writing friends, get the pleasure and benefit today of learning from my experience and its impact on my writing.

The Unlikeliness of My Writing Vacay

You may relate to my experience, as most readers at WITS have found themselves questioning the validity of their writing obsession at some point. Writing is the exercise of the mind that I crave, different from going to the gym, which I dread. Writing was a daily habit I looked forward to, carving out minutes each busy day to devote to the craft. To be cliché, writing is the air I breathe, the food I eat, and the thoughts that maintain me each day. So, how does a writer stop writing? And what happens to them when they do?

For me, it started with getting on a plane after a relatively successful book launch. As I looked over what I would bring in my carry on, I noticed that half of my bed was covered in office supplies. Notebooks, sticky notes, cords, chargers, pens… so many pens. My computer alone weighs around three and a half pounds and standing at my bedside I started to mentally add up the total heaviness. Like leaving the equivalent of a bowling ball on the bed, I left it all behind.

Facing the Writing Break

Normally, I would have been anxious to feel the keys beneath my fingers, clacking away at a new story. Twitchy as I sought the feel of the silky pen gliding across the smooth paper, wicking up my thoughts. But I felt the opposite. 

Freedom. 

The lightness of my bag was refreshing.

The extra time spent interacting with the world around me was freeing.

It had been a long time since I walked outside of my writing persona. And it felt good.

Taking this break came at an opportune time for me, as I had finished one book, and have another ready for the publishing process. The pressure to produce, plan, and promote had been lifted for a moment. I had not mindfully put my writing aside in years, and I discovered it was a great way to refresh my work as a writer.

5  Ways to Jumpstart Your Writing Return

1. Pushing pause on your writing work can be beneficial and refreshing, but it also comes with a potential erosion of your writing habits. Remember which routines made you the most productive and use those patterns to ease you back into your writing.
2.  Focus on your family and friends. I recommend setting your break around events that you would normally like to focus on other things, like the holidays or a special family or friends’ event. Being present will enrich those experiences which will add to your ability to write meaningful stories when you start up again.
3. Sign up for a writing class, workshop, or conference. I am currently participating in the WIP (Women in Publishing) 2026 virtual conference and am energized by their knowledgeable contributors, writing friend connections, and timely content. There are also classes and workshops from our WITS contributors that can improve your writing career.
4. Join, or continue working with, a writing or critique group. Having a set schedule and audience for portions of your work adds accountability to your writing goals. This can bolster your writing productivity after a break.
5. Set aside writing time for yourself and put these ‘meetings’ in your calendar. Show up for yourself and rebuild your writing muscles as you set your mind back to work.

Enjoy your writing more

Writing is a lifelong adventure for most of us, and it comes with seasons, high and low points, and occasionally breaks. Starting up after a hiatus can come with its challenges, but the rewards for writing will have you clambering away again at your computer soon. 

Remember what first sparked your interest in writing when you return after a long break. Take time to revisit your writing goals and refresh your perspective on your accomplishments. These tips can help revitalize the quality of your words and the sense of contentment you feel as you flex your writing muscles once again. Happy Writing to you all!

Describe a time when you stopped writing. How did you get back into your writing groove?

About Kris

Kris Maze is a speculative fiction author who crafts suspenseful, heartfelt stories with twisty plots and a touch of the uncanny. Her work blends science fiction, mystery, and emotional depth, often exploring the big “what-if” questions of life and the universe. She also writes darker fiction under the pen name Krissy Knoxx. When she isn’t writing, she’s likely teaching, traveling, or wandering trails pondering the wisdom of Bob Ross. Follow her author events and join her newsletter found at KrisMaze.com.

Parallel Lives – The Paths Not Taken

Check out my new release! A speculative time travel with light romance elements!

Harriet Last doesn’t expect much to change in her careful, practical life. That is, until a tech demo lets her revisit the “paths not taken.” What she finds is a glimmer of the person she used to be… and a thread of unexpected connection she can’t quite explain.

As Harriet explores these softly shifting memories, she begins to see where she set her dreams aside and where she might pick them back up again.

A heart warming, hope-filled story about rediscovering yourself, welcoming possibility, and noticing the spark that’s been beside you all along.

Buy it today wherever you purchase your next favorite story!

By Rachel Warmath

Becoming an author is a wild ride, and that’s what I want to talk about in today’s blog post: the emotional journey of publishing your work and how it’s an initiation into a new phase of your life. 

There are a lot of emotional highs and lows that come with the process, and it helps to embrace them! When you step into more authority and visibility, you’re going to feel a bit uncomfortable at first. But that’s when your real courage as an author kicks in. And the more open-minded and open-hearted you can be, the more you’ll receive from the experience.

Here are 7 things I’ve learned from my own author journey (and as a witness and guide to hundreds of authors as a ghostwriter, editor, and coach).

1. Writing is a transformational journey of healing and identity. It goes beyond expanding your career or becoming a bestseller.

Selling copies is wonderful, but there’s so much more to embodying your author identity than what people can see on the surface. When you become an author, your confidence grows in powerful and sometimes unseen ways. You carry yourself differently. You show up differently.

Finishing a project can feel like wholeness. Peace. Pride. Newfound self-assurance. Trusting your voice. You may suddenly find you have the courage to pursue other challenging projects you’ve previously held off on because you now know you have the endurance. Things shift for you at a soul level. 

For many of us, becoming an author is a lifetime dream achieved. Notice how happy your inner child is when you hold your book in your hands for the first time. Of course it’s great if the book opens doors to speaking opportunities or more money in your bank account, but it’s also about who you’re becoming as a person.

2. In the beginning, writing can be very messy, which can feel scary especially if you have perfectionist or control-freak tendencies.

I’m smiling as I write this because I definitely fall into this category. What’s really cool is that every book I’ve worked on has helped me heal my perfectionism through seeing the early stages of creation as a phase of experimentation. I run experiments in my first drafts, instead of needing to get it “right.” I have fun and go wild and let sentences be rambly and all over the place. I don’t worry about organizing the ideas yet. This allows the rawness of the truth and my lived experience to come out on the page. 

If you can stay out of your own way during a first draft, you open up a beautiful world where you get to play and see what happens.

As the great writer and writing teacher Anne Lamott says, “Messes are the artist’s true friend. We need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.”

3. At some point you are likely to feel a gnarly sense of imposter syndrome and question whether your story is worth telling at all. 

You may even give up on your book momentarily. 

Please don't let this stop you. And please remember that this is actually quite normal. Wanting to throw your draft in the trash and walk away forever is often a sign of a breakthrough on its way.

It’s like we say in the recovery community, “Don’t quit before the miracle happens.” You’re on the edge of something great and if you can surrender to the unknown, you’ll find stable ground again soon.

Walking through the fire is part of becoming an author. Writing a book often forces you to confront the places where you still don’t fully believe yourself. That can be tough, but keep trusting yourself along the way.

4. Getting to know your inner critic can be incredibly revealing and rewarding.

You might see advice out there saying to just “quiet” or “banish” your inner critic—the harsh, judgmental inner voice. But from what I’ve experienced and seen, that can actually be counterproductive and even harmful. Instead, get to know this part of you and how they have helped you survive.

What if you sat with your inner critic and had lunch or went for a walk? Go on a coffee date with them. What drink do they order? What are they itching to talk to you about? What’s their body language like? 

Ask this part of you what they want you to know. What are they worried about or stressed over? What do they need?

When you soothe and befriend your inner critic, you grow. Learning where this part of you comes from and what they’re wanting to manage or protect you from can help you learn a lot about yourself. As Richard Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems (IFS), says, “Parts are little inner beings who are trying their best to keep you safe.” And your inner critic part may just need some extra love and reassurance as you step into this new chapter of creating a meaningful book and sharing it with the world. 

5. Writing a book is probably going to take longer than you think it will, and that’s okay.

Every book is on its own unique timetable. What if instead of rushing or trying to cut corners, you believed that you were right on time?

Give yourself ample time to rest and process your emotions. This will serve you and your readers and will give a calmer energy to the stories when people read them.

Hurrying and trying to use shortcuts only leads you back to yourself.

6. Structuring a book is hard.

Don’t worry about getting the order of chapters and the organization of ideas right on the first draft. Things might feel out of place. This is where an editor comes in. They can help you with structure as this is their zone of genius. Find someone who you feel safe and comfortable around, and be really honest with them about what you’re most concerned about. Let them guide you in tackling structure head-on rather than avoiding talking about it.

Trust the process. Take the pressure off. If you can create freedom and fun within the revision process, some amazing ideas will bubble up to the surface.

7. Save some energy for marketing and launching your book (because that phase is a whole new project in and of itself). And check yourself on what limiting beliefs are holding you back when you launch.

Many authors struggle to enjoy promoting their work. This often comes down to limiting self-beliefs. If you have a negative, yucky inner monologue all the time, it’s time to flip the script!

Here are the most common limiting beliefs I see authors needing to reframe:

• “I suck at marketing.”
• “Others will be annoyed hearing about my book over and over.”
• “People will just find my book eventually, so I'll just wait instead of promoting it.”
• “What if no one reads my work or cares?”
• “I'm not good with the tech side of marketing.”

Here are five reframes for those beliefs:

• “I love sharing about my work because my book helps others.”
• “Others want to hear from me, and my voice is important.”
• “The best way for my audience to know about my book is if I tell them.”
• “The right people will find my book because I have the courage to talk about it.”
• “I'm empowered to learn a new skill and I can ask for help any time I need it.”

This is profound inner work and growth. If you can create a safe, encouraging, and upbeat inner monologue around launching your work, you will go far.

Becoming an author will ask a lot of you, but it will also give back to you in amazing ways. Whether you’re just starting to write, you’re in the messy middle, or you’ve launched your book, keep enjoying the experience of trusting yourself more and more.

Choosing to keep going is what makes you the author you are.

I’d love to hear which of these lessons resonates most with you and where you are in your author journey. What else have you learned that you weren’t expecting?

About Rachel

Rachel Warmath is a writer, ghostwriter, and book shaman based in Utah. She loves supporting authors. You can connect with her and learn more about her work at www.RachelWarmath.com.

Featured photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash.

by James R. Preston

When you’re in the hospital you have a lot of time to think.

In my case it was, in part, what do I want to say to the WITS audience if I get a chance to write to them again?

The answer was clear.

We’re going to touch a lot of bases. We’ll examine what makes a story different from real life; we’ll look at the end of one of Robert A. Heinlein’s novels and you’ll have a chance to rewrite it, and then a chance to see what the majority of readers think. I’ll critique a movie I just saw, and we’ll have a few words about a constellation, a little astronomy bonus at no extra charge. And I’ll share the answer I came up with to a question I wasn’t aware I was asking.

In “Peter Pan” Tinkerbelle dies. The audience is asked to clap to show that they believe in fairies and bring her back to life, changing the end.

Orion’s Belt

If you have a chance, go outside some fall evening and look for Orion. It’s one of the most easily-recognized constellations. To find it if you are in the northern hemisphere, look south on a fall night. Find three bright stars in a row. That’s his belt. Hold that thought.

Podkayne of Mars

Spoiler alert! I’m going to tell you the end, and then I’ll tell you the other end. (Huh? What? Yeah, there’re two ends, sort of like the Director’s Cut of a movie.) When Heinlein first published Podkayne of Mars, the publisher didn’t like the way it ended. Still with me? Ok, here’s the spoiler: in the first end, the way Heinlein wrote it, Podkayne dies. Yep. Heinlein kills the main character.

He kills the lead character in a story that is mostly first-person, which is a pretty neat trick. Yow! What gives? It was not what I would have expected, but that’s not what I read because he was made to change it. When first published, Podkayne is seriously injured but she lives and that’s what I first read when I was in Junior High. Years later, Baen Books came out with a paperback edition in which they added Heinlein’s original end. And they asked readers which one they liked best.

Ok, let’s talk about what makes a story satisfying. It doesn’t have to be a “Happy End,” it just has to be the right end. The characters in your stories are, by definition, going to have problems. The essence of a story is a character who wants something and another something is keeping them from getting it. The conflict in the story, whether external or internal, and its resolution are what make a satisfying end.

Story and Reality

Ok, “real life” doesn’t always have neat, happy endings. So what? If your novel was a mirror of real life you could just write down everything that happened to you for a day (see James Joyce’s Ulysses) and it would be a story. It worked for Joyce, but I can’t do it. If you can, more power to you. Meanwhile, you know and I know that it doesn’t work like that for us.

As a writer, you make a story, supplying structure to life’s randomness. Pattern recognition. Pattern making. It goes back at least to hunter-gatherers looking at the sky and seeing animals and people and even Orion and recording those stories in caves for us to find 50,000 years later.

Let Your characters Have Some Fun

Robert B. Parker’s Spenser finds joy in cooking and in his relationship with Susan Silverman. Matt Helm (from the books, not the silly Dean Martin movies) enjoys being outdoors fishing and camping. Stephanie Plum loves her family despite the fact that they make her want to scream. Let your characters experience some joy. In my case, my protagonist in the Surf City Mysteries revels in early morning at the Huntington Pier when the air is still and the waves are glassy.

Iron Lung

I recently saw a science fiction movie where a convict is welded into a submarine and sent off to find something. “Iron Lung” made me think about this essay in a new way. There is not a moment of relief in that whole two hours. And the end is “ripped from the headlines of realism”—the viewer is not sure whether the hero succeeded or not, or if it mattered. It just ends.

I found it unsatisfying, totally unsatisfying. There are many good things about the film, but it’s as if we looked at the sky, at Orion, and saw—nothing. Random spots of light. “But, life is like that.” “Right! Art is not life. Art is making sense of the world around us.” It’s our job as writers to look at the sky and say, “Hey that looks like Orion. See those three stars? That’s his belt.”

Which leads us back to Podkayne of Mars.

Podkayne Again

Like I said, I believe the author has the responsibility to pick an end. That’s their job. I don’t mean tying everything up with a big pink bow, but a conclusion of some sort. The ending RAH picked was, to say the least, a downer. Podkayne is killed in a bomb explosion. The publisher didn’t like it; one reason being that the book was aimed at a young market, readers who would not see the point of the death. Reluctantly, Heinlein wrote a new end in which she lives. And the end of the story? In the new edition, when Baen asked readers which they preferred, by a 2-to-1 margin they voted for—wait for it—Podkayne dying.

How do I feel about that?

I have to go with Podkayne living. I think the publisher was right and Heinlein was right to make the change. With Poddy dead, buried in radioactive mud, what’s the point? I think most modern interpretations are reading into the story things that are not there. However, it’s Heinlein’s story and he should get to pick the end. The fact that I think he is wrong is immaterial. The comments on the web indicate that I’ve got a lot of company.

I was privileged to study writing under the great Harlan Ellison. I will never forget how he drummed into us, “What’s the point?” What’s the story about? What’s the point of an ambiguous end? That life is ambiguous? Tell me something I don’t know.

Lest you think I am devoted to only “And they lived happily ever after” ends, stream The Outer Limits, “Demon with a Glass Hand” by Harlan Ellison, which I think is one of the best stories ever to appear on the small screen, and which does not have that kind of end. This time: no spoiler. If you haven’t seen it, you’re in for a treat.

I stand by the last line of James Clavell’s Noble House: It’s good to be alive.

One More Time

Orion doesn’t really have a belt. We give him one when we look at the sky and see the constellation. Pattern creation. That’s what we do.

Has there ever been a performance of Peter Pan where the audience doesn’t clap and the director says, “Well, that’s it, folks. Tinkerbelle bit the tuna. The end.” I don’t think so.

Let your work reflect a little joy and supply a bit of structure to a chaotic universe.

It’s good to be alive.

—James Clavell, Noble House and
William Faulkner, the Long Hot Summer

Now, since Writers in the Storm is an active community of writers, it’s your turn. What’s your take on endings? Have you read a novel with two ends and if so, what did you think? Did you get a chance to Google Podkayne and read about the two ends? Am I behind the times when I say Iron Lung is unsatisfying? What kind of end do you like to write or read?

About James

James R. Preston is the author of the award-winning Surf City Mysteries. He is currently at work on Roachclip, the third of his short novels set at Cal State Long Beach in 1969, Kirkus Reviews called the first of the series, Buzzkill, “A historical thriller enriched by characters who sparkle and refuse to be forgotten.” His work has been selected for inclusion in the University Of Berkeley collection California Detective Fiction.

Find out more about James at his website.

Top image from Pixabay.