How to Take a Break

Sometimes you have to take a vacation from the words. Here's how.

1. Leave yourself notes about the project when you leave off, for example, “The next thing that needs to happen is this…” so when you come back, you know how to get back into the project. This is Sarina’s daily practice, but it really helps when she has to leave a project behind. This can be especially helpful when you have to go away for an unexpected emergency. 
   
   
2. Jennie adds that the only way you can do this is if you have a place to keep and find those notes to yourself. In one of your 47 notebooks or in the document itself? Or, as Jess adds, on the side of the cardboard box you use for trash in your basement workshop that you almost recycle by accident. 
   
   
3. Jennie also notes that you have to have intentionality, to know what you are writing so you can know what comes next, whether that’s in your outline, inside outline, or whatever. 
   
   
4. Jennie has a little notebook she brings on vacation with her and she downloads those ideas into that just before going to sleep at night when she’s away. 
   
   
5. These vacation inspiration moments are much like shower thoughts, part of the magic of our brain unhooking, getting into deep default mode network, and becoming its most creative. 
   
   
6. Sarina mentioned an article about how walking makes you more creative, also a study in why tapping into the default mode network is so effective as a practice. 
   
   

1. The only way to get over this is to sit down and do it. Open the document. Just start. 
   
   
2. Jennie points out that getting back into a manuscript when it’s disappeared feels horrifying but it’s much easier than it sounds and has happened to one of our frequent guests, Sarah Stewart Taylor, when her then-toddler created a password for the document that was not recoverable. She had to give in to the fact that her book was gone, and recreate it out of her memory. 
   
   

1. It only took Jess until her fiftieth year to figure out that her process - of walking, gardening, beekeeping, musing - is a part of writing, and that’s cool. 
   
   
2. Can you be a writer if you are not actively writing? Yes, if research, planning, thinking and otherwise cogitating is a part of your writing process. Get over it. The words have to land on the page eventually, of course, but if you are doing both, have grace for the not-actively-writing part of the writing process.