How do I get back into my novel after months away?

By Brenn and Lindsay, the two writers who built Inkling

The draft is still there. The problem is not the story, it is the door. Here is the side entrance: what to read, what to skip, and how small the first session is allowed to be.

The draft is still there. You have not opened it since spring, or since the baby, or since the job that ate the year. Every so often you think about it and feel a small door close. You are not sure you remember the innkeeper's name. You are fairly sure the middle was a mess.

We have both been here, and so has nearly every writer we know. Most of them get back in. The ones who do not are usually stopped by the same thing: they try to re-enter through the front door, by rereading everything, and the front door is heavy. Here is the side door.

Should I reread the whole draft?

No.

It sounds responsible. It is actually the most common way to lose another month. Rereading a whole draft cold does two things, and both are bad for you right now: it turns you into an editor before you have written a word, and it shows you every flaw at once, with no momentum to carry you past them. Helping Writers Become Authors has a whole post on returning to writing after a long break, and it is worth reading before you open the file.

Read the last scene you wrote. Read your notes, if you kept any. Then stop reading. The rest of the draft will still be there when you have a reason to go back to it, and by then you will be a writer visiting an earlier chapter, not a stranger judging a whole book.

How do I remember where I left off?

Write yourself a "previously."

One paragraph, in your own words, like the recap at the top of a TV episode. Who is where, what just happened, what the next scene was supposed to do. Do not polish it. If you cannot remember what the next scene was supposed to do, write that down too; it is useful information. This paragraph is the single most valuable thing you will produce in your first session back, and it might be the only thing.

Then check your outline, if you had one, and your cast list. Not to obey them, just to reload them. The innkeeper's name. Which sister is the older one. The thing you set up in chapter four that you were going to pay off later. If you never kept a cast list, this is a good moment to start one; our guide to keeping track of characters covers the minimum that actually helps. If you never had an outline, a page of "what I think happens next" is an outline. Pantsers are allowed notes too.

How do I stop editing instead of writing?

This is the trap right after the reread trap, and it catches the writers who avoided the first one. You open the last scene to find your place, you notice a clumsy sentence, you fix it, you notice another, and an hour later you have a better last scene and no new words.

Two rules that work for us. First, edit in a separate sitting from writing, never the same one. If you must fix things, do it tomorrow, on purpose, as its own job. Second, when you see a problem in old pages, do not fix it; leave a note. "Innkeeper is too nice here." "Cut this paragraph." Then keep going. The note is a promise to future you that the problem will be handled, which is all your brain wanted. Our guide on beating writer's block has more on why this works, because the editing reflex is usually stalling in a nicer outfit.

What if the story feels dead?

It is not dead. It is resting.

We mean that fairly literally. A story you have not touched in months has not lost anything; you have lost the feeling of being inside it, and that feeling comes back from writing, not from thinking about writing. Waiting to feel ready is the mechanism by which "a few months away" becomes "I used to write."

So change its status, out loud or in your app: not abandoned, resting. Then write one scene you can see. Not the next scene in order, necessarily. The one you can picture: the argument on the stairs, the reunion at the harbor, whatever has a clear image attached. Write that. It does not have to fit yet. A scene you can see is the fastest way back into a world, and once you are in, the next scene tends to show up. If it helps, our guide to writing a scene is built for exactly this: one unit, done well.

The comment thread under a Substack episode on why people cannot finish their novels is full of writers describing the same pause. What is striking is how few of them describe a story problem. Mostly it is a re-entry problem.

How small can the first session be?

Very. Two hundred words counts. One hundred counts. Writing the "previously" paragraph and closing the laptop counts.

The first session back has one job, and it is not word count. Its job is to make the second session easier. If you sit down for fifteen minutes, add a paragraph, and leave feeling like a person who is writing a novel again, that is a full success. Set the bar embarrassingly low for the first week. Our guide to word count goals gets into how to pick a number you can actually hit, and the short version is: the number that gets you to tomorrow's session is the right one.

How do I keep the gap from happening again?

You probably cannot prevent every gap. Life is going to do what it does. What you can do is make the next gap cheaper to come back from.

• End every session with a note to your future self. One line: where you are, what comes next. Thirty seconds. It is the "previously" written in advance.
• Keep the notes where the words are. A cast list in one app, an outline in another, and the draft in a third is three doors to reopen. Fewer doors, easier return.
• Give the story a status. Drafting, stuck, resting, finished. Naming a pause as a pause takes the shame out of it, and shame is what keeps the file closed.
• Keep a tiny floor. A hundred words on a bad day keeps the thread warm. The goal on a hard week is not progress, it is contact.

How Inkling handles this

We built the return trip into the desk, because we kept needing it ourselves.

Every story in your library opens with a short Previously recap of what you have written so far, in your own words, so you are never opening a file cold. If the generator is on, it writes that recap from your own pages, and that is all it does with them; it never writes your story. If you keep the generator off, write the paragraph yourself. It is a fine habit either way.

Every story has a status: drafting, stuck, resting, or finished. Marking a story "resting" is a small thing that has kept more than one of ours alive. And the cast and the storyboard sit beside the draft, so the notes are where the words are and there is exactly one door to reopen.

None of that writes the scene for you. It just means that when you come back after months away, the first ten minutes are spent remembering, not searching, and the eleventh minute is spent writing.

Open the file. Read the last scene. Write the paragraph. That is the whole first day, and it is enough.