# 230: Getting Out Of a Writing Slump (Without Forcing It)

Stuck in a writing slump? You’re not alone.

In this episode, we’re talking about those hard, heavy moments when the words won’t come, your story feels stalled, and self-doubt creeps in. Slumps are a normal part of the creative cycle, but they can feel lonely and defeating when you’re deep in one.

Today, I’m sharing gentle, practical ways to find your way back without forcing it or beating yourself up.

You’ll learn:

 → Why slumps happen (even to seasoned authors)
 → Small, doable steps to ease back in
 → Why changing your environment can release stuck thinking and ignite fresh ideas
 → Ways to reconnect with your original spark and fall in love with your story again

If writing feels hard right now, this episode is your permission slip to stop shaming yourself, and start moving forward with curiosity, compassion, and small, steady steps.

Episode Web Page

Most first drafts don't stall because writing is hard. They stall because there's a weak link in the foundation. The Story Clarity Worksheet helps you find it. Download yours free at nancipanuccio.com/clarity

Transcript

1:02

Revisit the moments that worked. Not everything in your draft is broken. Read a passage or chapter you love. Let yourself feel good about what you've already created. Writer Unleashed is for you, a writer who has a story you wanna bring onto the page and into the hearts and minds of readers. I'm Nancy Puccio, writer, editor, and book coach. Each week we'll explore techniques, mindsets, and inspiration for writing stories readers can't put down. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let's begin. My days are spent helping writers write and revise their stories, but so many writers I talk to. And so many writers who email me have difficulty finding the time and the energy to create with all of life's responsibilities bearing down on them. And if you think this gets easier once you're published, well maybe, but not necessarily whether you're writing in those spare pockets of time between work. Family and household commitments, or you have all the time in the world, kids are outta the house, you're retired, or you're just able to write full time. You still may need to constantly recommit to and reinvent how you show up to the page. And this is especially true whenever you hit a writing slump. A writing slump is when you lose inspiration and motivation. We've all been there and every writer hits them from time to time. This can come from burnout, stress, fatigue, or overwhelm. It could be overwhelm with life's responsibilities or overwhelmed with the sheer volume of material you have for your story. Maybe you know your story isn't working, but you don't know how to make it work, and this can be dispiriting and lead to a slump that's hard to recover from. Either way. You hit a wall and you lose creative momentum. You lose inspiration. Some writers quit their story altogether. They quit writing altogether because they see it as a sign. They're not cut out for the writing life. So if you've been staring at the page or avoiding it all together, you're not alone. Writing Slumps happen to every writer. They're a natural part of the creative cycle. They can sneak up after a burst of momentum or they can settle in when life gets busy or when self-doubt creeps in and then we feel guilty, we beat ourselves up. We layer shame and judgment on top of it. I should be writing what's wrong with me, what made me think I could write this novel? And then the slump becomes self perpetuating. It's a no win cycle, but slumps are never permanent. They're a normal part of the creative process, and today I'm going to show you how to move through them with four practical, compassionate strategies. So here we go. First. Acknowledge that slumps are a normal part of the creative process. Stop shaming yourself. Writing slumps are part and parcel of the writing life, so replace guilt or shame with curiosity. What's really going on here? Is it burnout? Is it fear? Is it confusion or simply exhaustion? You wanna identify the source. Not all slumps are the same. So identify what's driving yours. Is it burnout? Maybe you have too much going on in your life, aside from writing, you need rest, not more pressure. You know, rest is not passive. It's active, it's restorative. I say this, having a hard time resting myself, and I don't just mean physical rest, I mean mental rest, creative rest. I know that when I'm struggling to create anything, I need to step away and do something else, and that might mean doing the laundry or vacuuming the den. It may mean laying down for 20 minutes. It may mean taking a day off or a week off. Maybe perfectionism is causing the slump. If you find that you always have the urge to rewrite everything before you've even finished the first draft, you probably need permission to not grip it so hard and to write badly. It doesn't have to be stellar right outta the gate. Give yourself permission to write badly. It's okay. It will get better. First, you have to loosen the grip to be perfect. Maybe you just have lack of clarity about what story you're actually telling. And if that's the case and you find yourself lost and overwhelmed, you just need to reconnect with your story once you name the root cause. Once you identify the root cause, you're working for more self-awareness and compassion. Here's what to do when you're ready to ease back in strategy number two, try a gentle reboot. Dan Blank, the founder of We Grow Media, who helps writers build their author platforms suggest using inertia to your advantage. So what does that look like? Even as you struggle to complete your book, you can still manage to work on it consistently, just not at the same speed you were working when you were writing full throttle for maybe hours at a time. For you, that could mean you write only 10 minutes at a time, and that might only be on weekends. It doesn't have to be for long stretches of time. Even if the effort is subpar to your standards, you should still acknowledge and celebrate that you're still showing up. Even if you're just keeping your writing on life support during this low point, you're still showing up every week. So tiny commitments, 10 minutes or maybe aim for one paragraph. The idea here is to do low stakes writing. It could be free writing for 10 or 20 minutes, but you wanna acknowledge that progress isn't always word count. Even if you write for 10 minutes every Saturday and Sunday, you're showing up. That's a win. So ease yourself in slowly with a gentle reboot. Okay. Strategy. Number three, change locations. Your space affects your mind. Our brains make associations. If you've been sitting at the same desk, staring at the same screen while stuck or frustrated, your brain starts to associate that space with pressure, self-judgment, and stuckness. A new environment breaks that pattern. It signals to your brain this is something different and different, can help you loosen up creatively. Now, a change in location could just be micro shifts. You don't have to leave your house. I have two spaces where I work in my house. I have an upstairs office, which is where I'm recording this podcast, and I have a laptop set up downstairs in my living room. This is where I do all my coaching calls. Now my office can get cluttered. So whenever I'm feeling disenchanted with what I'm working on, I'll often just clear the clutter of bills and other paperwork off my desk. I'll rearrange some furniture and organize my bookshelves, or I'll add a piece of furniture, like a table where I can put a vase of flowers or I'll change the lighting. You don't. Have to pack up and find the perfect rustic cabin or writing retreat. You can change your environment right now in simple ways. You can move to a different room. Maybe you write on the couch or the porch. You can switch from screen to paper. Sometimes it's the blinking cursor that makes you freeze A notebook, feels lower stakes, and more intimate. You could change the sensory backdrop. Open a window, light a candle, put on ambient music, or have complete silence. Engage your senses in new ways. Sometimes though, you need to physically leave, you have to get outta the house, and this can be the shift you need. You can go to a coffee shop or a library. I do this regularly. There's something about coffee shops, not noisy coffee shops, but a place with a low key vibe. There's this great space in my community called Deja Brew. It's a beautiful space. They have a bookshelf of hardcover novels and they have a room that has. Couches and chairs and a fireplace. In winter, the vibe is relaxing and rejuvenating. And in summer because it gets way too hot, especially in my office, I like to go work in our local library. It used to be a church, so it still retains that peaceful, high ceilinged ambiance. There's stained glass windows. It's air conditioned. Which I love in the summer, and I'm surrounded by books. So what more can you ask for? Often the soft hum of people around. You can make writing feel communal rather than isolating. Maybe you go outdoors, you take your laptop to a park or your backyard. I like to bring my laptop or my notebook and work on my backyard deck, or I go to my local arboretum and I work in the gazebo facing the lake. I also find that when I travel to a new country, the creative surge I get is almost more than I can bear. It's a great way to get out of a slump. Think of it as a no pressure writing date. Bring your notebook to a new place and just observe, jot down sensory details, snippets of conversation. There's no pressure to work on the novel. Just reawaken your writer's attention. You're always writing even when you're not. Part of being a writer is to pay attention. So keeping a journal or notebook is a no pressure way to stay in touch with or reactivate your writing. Writing impulses. Sometimes it's not about location at all. It's about breaking the association with I have to write something good right now. A new place gives you permission to play again. Okay, onto strategy number four, reconnect to your work, but not with pressure. Not with, okay, I have to figure this out right now. It's more like what drew me here in the first place? Because here's what happens in a slump. You lose touch with that original spark you had when you started. You had a reason, maybe it was a vivid image or scene you couldn't shake. Maybe it was a question you were wrestling with about human nature or about your own life. Maybe it was simply a character. Who felt alive and interesting to you, but once the writing gets hard, and it always does, that original spark can feel distant, if not totally absent. You're no longer thinking about discovery. You're thinking about getting through it, about fixing plot holes, about revising that messy middle, and that's natural. But if you wanna get out of the slump, you need to shift the way you're thinking about your story. Here are a few things you might try. First, go back to your earliest notes or free writes, when this idea first came alive for you. Look for what grabbed you. What was exciting about this story? See if that thread still pulls at you. Next, ask yourself, what am I trying to figure out through this story? Stories aren't just about plots and characters. They're about questions we care about, and the act of writing is often about searching for those answers. So get curious again, what questions are woven into your story. What does this story help you explore or understand? This is admittedly easier once you've stepped away from and taken a rest, whether that's a day, a week, or six weeks, you wanna get back in touch with the original impetus that drove you to write this story in the first place. It's so easy to lose touch with that original spark, especially when the writing feels hard or you're not having fun with it anymore. So what was your original inspiration? Reach back to when the idea first came to you. Your story matters to you, otherwise you wouldn't have started writing it. So what are you trying to figure out with this piece of writing? By the time you hit a slump, the story often feels heavy. It becomes a puzzle to solve, a burden to finish. It's easy to lose sight of the why beneath the what. So gently find your way back to the heart of your story. You started it for a reason. There was an impulse, a spark, a question, or a curiosity that lit you up. Over time as drafts pile up and doubts creep in, that gets buried under the pressure to finish. So your job now isn't to push forward blindly, it's to remember, ask yourself, what am I trying to figure out through this story? All good stories are at some level, personal, even if they don't reflect your life literally. They reflect your questions about people, about the world or yourself. Revisit the moments that worked. Not everything in your draft is broken. Read a passage or chapter you love. Let yourself feel good about what you've already created. Confidence comes from remembering you can do this. Confidence doesn't come from getting it right. It comes from saying, I can figure this out. So you wanna engage with your story in a different way. Okay? So let's bring this all together. If you're in a writing slump right now, remember it's not a sign your story's broken or that you're not cut out for this. Slumps are normal. They're part of the creative cycle. Every writer, no matter how seasoned faces them, what matters is how you respond and how quickly you rebound. Here's what we talked about today to help you move through it. First, stop shaming yourself. Slumps aren't failures or a condemnation of your worth. As a writer, they're just signals. Get curious about what's really going on. Is it burnout? Is it your tendency for perfectionism? Is it confusion about your story overwhelm or something else? Second, try a gentle reboot. Show up in small ways. 10 minutes, one paragraph. Do it consistently. Consistency, even in small doses, rebuilds, momentum. Third change locations. Break the association with your stuck space. Try micro shifts at home or head somewhere new to spark fresh energy and perspective. And fourth, reconnect with your story, return to your original spark. What drew you to this idea? What are you trying to explore or figure out? Rekindling, this connection can remind you why this story matters to you. And if it matters to you, it matters to your readers. Being stuck isn't the end of the road. It's part of the process. And sometimes it's an invitation. An invitation to slow down, an invitation to listen more deeply. An invitation to return to your work with curiosity, tenderness, and trust. You're still a writer. Even when it's hard. Even when it's messy, even when it feels like nothing is working, the slump will pass and your story will still be waiting for you when it does. So if you're stuck right now, if you're in a slump. Take heart, stay curious. Be kind to yourself and keep showing up. Even if showing up today looks like resting. So there you have it. Thanks for hanging out with me today. If you know any writers who need some support in their writing, please share this episode or the Writer Unleash podcast in general. And if you love what you're listening to, subscribe on your favorite listening platform. And if you're listening on Apple, please leave me a review. Reading how this podcast impacts your writing truly lights me up. And helps me create topics for the show. Till next time, keep writing and I'll talk to you soon.