When Writing Doesn’t Look Like Writing: Thinking, resting, and moving around

By Amalia Gladhart

At a recent Writers Life Lunch at Wordcrafters, people shared the challenges of sitting down to write and talked about what worked for them. They talked about the importance of routine and commitment, about having a community, and noted that it had often been a struggle to write regularly, to make themselves write, to get it done. 

In response, there were many great suggestions for ways to overcome inertia, reluctance, rejection, or uncertainty. One person talked about a preference for writing while walking, taking along a device to record voice dictation. Others mentioned accountability partners, fixed schedules, and messy drafts. 

Be gentle with yourself

Without discounting the need for discipline or for regular practice, I want to consider the need for flexibility and for being gentle with ourselves. 

Reasons why it’s difficult to write may be personal, practical, creative, or some combination. Sometimes it’s the material itself that gets in the way, sometimes it’s daily life. 

Minda Honey’s piece in Poets & Writers magazine (May/June 2026), “The Joy of the Tortured Artist: Why We Write, Even When We Hate to Write,” points out some of the barriers between many writers and their time at the desk, among them long work hours, low wages, or caregiving responsibilities. Those challenges can’t be wished or self-disciplined away.

A writer needs to write regularly, but that doesn’t necessarily have to mean every day or for a set period of time. Results may vary. It’s okay to take a day off.

Writing takes real effort

Writing is work. There’s the mental labor of transforming a clear yet amorphous sense of a character’s tone into concrete dialogue and the physical strain of sitting at a desk, of writing by hand, or mouse-clicking ten thousand times in an effort to expunge every excess that. Then there’s the emotional effort of reliving painful experiences, recognizing personal weaknesses, revisiting regrets. Writing can be incredibly fun, joyful, rewarding, but it’s seldom effortless.

All the more reason to acknowledge the importance of resting, thinking, and (sometimes) noodling away at a question just below the surface while doing something else. 

I’m trying to make a double claim here: one, it’s okay to do nothing—sleep, doodle, daydream, whatever. We shouldn’t have to justify how we spend every minute of the day. Everyone needs to rest.

Make space for writing in the background

Just as important—if somewhat contradictory—is to recognize how much writing happens in the back of our minds, under cover, in dribs and drabs. Granted, this probably works best if you’ve established a habit of noticing, of being open to ideas, of playing around with words, on or off paper or screen. If you do have a regular (or regular enough) writing practice, you are likely always half thinking about some bit of it: a descriptive detail, a character quirk, a sentence that won’t leave you alone. 

My argument for thinking and resting is an argument for making space for that back channel, the semi-conscious, daydreamy, internal monologue activity, those thoughts that may later make it onto the page verbatim, or may be the stepping stones we need.

Sometimes writing doesn’t look like writing. Sometimes I’ll deliberately set out on a walk with the intention of thinking about an achingly obvious plot hole and what to do about it. Other times, a new question or a turn of phrase pops up, the solution to a dilemma I wasn’t consciously mulling. 

Moving towards your writing

Sometimes, too, I find myself circling a draft. Nudging a sentence here, grappling with a paragraph there, then needing to get up and move around and do something else for a while. For me, light housekeeping often fills that “it’s not procrastination, it’s added value” gap. A couple of trips up and downstairs with the laundry basket, and I’ll finally hit upon an opening sentence. Roll the recycling bin out to the curb, pull a couple of weeds on the way back and, hey, maybe it would make more sense to tell the story in a different order. It may look wildly inefficient, on both the writing and the housekeeping fronts, but I generally get both tasks done, approximately in tandem, close enough to on time.

One thing we didn’t talk about much at the luncheon (we only had an hour and a half!) was what we do as we prepare to write; what activities ground us, or refresh us, or let us write in the background. 

So this is my plug for the importance of thinking and resting, and for writing while walking (or doing a jigsaw puzzle, pruning the raspberries, kneading the bread dough). I think all of the following are true:  

  • Inspiration can strike unexpectedly, sometimes when you’re looking away. 
  • Brains need to rest. 
  • Sometimes it takes some movement—a walk, a chore, a wander around the house—to knock something loose.
  • It’s a good idea to travel with a notebook (or a recording device), just in case.

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