Writing In Waves

There was a version of me, not that long ago, who wrote like it was a religion.

Mushroom coffee first. Let the dog out and feed her. Meditation or music as I made my daughter’s lunch. I’d drive her to school, and then come home, set up my desk, light a candle, and make sure I had three beverages close by: mushroom coffee (or other caffeinated option), electrolyte drink, and water. Then, and only then, could I sit and write for the next several hours—sometimes straight through until it was time to pick my daughter up from school.

For better or worse, I’m an all-in kind of person. Always have been.

In 2022 and 2023, I logged over a million new words, each year! I drafted five full-length novels one year, and three the next. I had several more outlined and waiting their turn in a folder on my hard drive. If I wrote less than 2k words in a day, I called it a slow one. Plenty of days I broke 7k, 8k, 10k new words, and I tracked everything. I kept spreadsheets, charted my word counts, and rewarded myself for streaks. When I say I did NaNoWriMo year-round, I’m not exaggerating. When I wasn’t drafting novels, I was writing poetry and submitting short stories to contests as palate cleansers in my “free time”. There were vision boards and playlists, character profiles and world maps. Every spare moment not spent with my family was spent in front of my computer. I’m talking, on vacations, even—I kept my laptop and hard drive close. I wrote while the kids slept, or during breaks in the schedule. I filled my notes app with fragments of thoughts, lines of prose, metaphors, ideas for scenes.

I’m not saying this as some kind of humble brag. Genuinely, I’m trying to drive home just how integrated writing was into my daily life, at every level, because it’s a stark contrast to how things are now. I think, looking back, on some level I’d adopted the belief that this is just what real writers did. We stayed in that mode as close to constantly as humanly possible, because we couldn’t not.

And maybe that’s true for many writers. It was for me, for a time. I didn’t give up on this approach, nor did I consciously choose to change it at first. My brain negotiated the terms, and I had a choice: either adapt, or stop writing.

In December of 2024, one of my kids went through something very hard, and my role as mom will always come first. Period. Then, in early 2025, what we believe was likely COVID hit our house, and not long after, the weakness and brain fog that accompanies my myasthenia gravis started creeping back in, after years of remission. By December 2025, I was in the hospital, just praying against another serious crisis.

I’d written around 500k words in 2024, which was less than previous years, but I was deep in the editing trenches on the manuscripts I’d already drafted, so it didn’t feel like a slowdown so much as a different phase. By the end of 2025, however, I hadn’t finished a single new manuscript. I’d started two project I still love and haven’t abandoned, and I worked with a few clients on their projects. But the rushing river of new words I’d had for years seemed to dry up.

At first, that quiet felt like failure, because it felt like it was happening to me, and I couldn’t stop it. That’s never a good feeling.

Here’s the myth I didn’t realize I was carrying, though, until my physical health demanded I set it down: that being a real writer meant being relentless. With my all-or-nothing tendencies, I’d really formed a belief that told me writing meant dedicated work space, set hours, and full days, broken only for my kids and their scheduled activities. Anything else would be a lazy or half-hearted commitment to my craft, and that was unacceptable. Deep within that belief came another myth that writing life must look like devotion, and true devotion would yield maximum output.

I know I didn’t invent that myth on my own. It’s everywhere, not only in writing culture. The productivity trackers, the “real writers write every day” refrain, and the reverence for word-count marathons are probably pretty familiar to most of us in the writing space. I absorbed it the way anyone would absorb something when they’re immersed in it long enough. And for a few years, my body and brain could actually keep up with it, so I never really examined whether I truly believed it for myself, or if I just happened to be able to perform it, and thus accepted it.

But then I couldn’t perform that version of it anymore, and I had to get honest with myself about what was actually true, and what was actually happening for me internally.

Slowly, and definitely not always gracefully, I’ve let go of the idea of one long, unbroken writing session. I had to release sitting at the desk, for as many hours as possible, drafting new material every single day. My workspace didn’t need to be perfect, my memory didn’t need to hold a whole manuscript’s structure without writing it down, and not every minor character needed a full character exploration, complete with in-depth psychological profile. I could do vision boards and playlists, if I wanted to that day, but it wasn’t a requirement. I do still think all these things are beautiful practices, but they’re optional. And they ask for the kind of sustained creative bandwidth I just don’t reliably have when my chronic conditions are flared like this.

I won’t pretend letting go of it didn’t come with grief. It has. It still hits, some days. There’s an ache I refuse to deny when I think on it, because I genuinely loved my process. But what I also can no longer deny is that it doesn’t work for me anymore. I have to accept it.

Here’s what I’ve found as I’ve emerged on the other side of that grief: I’m still a writer.

My writing comes in waves now, rather than coursing through me like a river as it used to. And maybe, like I’ve come to learn is the case with most things, it’ll move between these states from time to time throughout my life.

I write in bed most days now. I have my laptop, adjustable lap desk, and a couple portable hard drives and USB sticks close. I work in smaller chunks, with more breaks. On days when the fog is heavy, I don’t try to force new material. I’ve noticed something strange and useful, though! Even in the fog, I can still edit. The technical, structural parts of writing seem to live in a different part of my brain than the part that generates something brand new, and the fog doesn’t always take both! So, foggy days became editing days, almost by accident, and it turned into an actually workable rhythm.

I’ve also gotten better at rough drafting on purpose. I’m learning to let go of needing beautiful prose in that first pass, which I used to reach for even in early drafts. I leave myself little notes and checklists now, like breadcrumbs for a foggier Future Me, so I can pick up those threads whenever my brain clears again, whenever the pain eases enough, or whenever there’s more energy to work with. I’ve learned to trust that clarity comes back—I just may not always be able to predict exactly when.

And strangely, some of what came out of this slower year fed directly into what’s coming next. The brain fog closed the door on drafting new novels at the old pace, but it opened space to go back to work I’d already done, which meant I could polish, refine, and prep it for the world instead of just adding to the pile. My debut novel, When Stars Disappear, is releasing this October, thanks at least partly to this year I once might have called unproductive.

I don’t think I’ll ever go back to a million words a year, and most days, I’ve stopped mourning that as a loss. It was a real season, and it gave me real books. But it was one mode, not the only legitimate one. There’s a freedom in accepting that.

If your process has to change shape because of illness, a kid who needs you, or a brain that just works differently than you’d like, I don’t have a formula for you. But I do have this: the writing is still real. Even in fragments. Even from bed. Even when it comes in waves instead of a flood. You’re still a writer on the days your ideas stay in your mind, and even if you never touch a keyboard or pick up a pen and paper for weeks at a time. Whatever the process looks like right now, as long as you’ve got stories to tell, and as long as you’re finding ways to get them out, it counts. And if you’re not a writer, I still think this concept transfers to other things.

So, I’m gonna ride this wave till it crests and crashes, and I invite you to do the same.