Natalie Ann Holborow

Let’s start with a hard truth: if you haven’t written in a long time and wish you could get back to you, no one’s going to do it for you. Making the words flow feels awkward to you now, like you’re holding a stranger’s hands in the dark. Perhaps you tell yourself this absence from writing doesn’t matter. You’ve built a life around it, haven’t you? Days of bustling about, of scrolling, of reminiscing about your old self and pretending not to hear it when it asks you, “When are you coming back?”

If you want to write, it’s ultimately down to you to claw your way back into it. It won’t be easy: there’s an overgrowth of your own self-doubt and pessimism to push through, and it doesn’t bend so easily. If you’ve been away from writing for a while – say months, years, or longer than you can even remember – that critical voice becomes stronger and more insistent. The truth is, the hardest part of writing again isn’t the writing at all.

It’s convincing yourself you can still do it.

If you’re here, reading this, then that means there’s still some part of you that wants to write again. But how do you find your way back when the confidence that used to drive you forward has left you long ago?

1. Accept that your first writing attempts will feel awkward

There’s no way to sugarcoat it: your first attempts to write again will probably make you cringe. Reading the words back will infuriate you.

I’ve got an entire folder of bad, getting-back-to-it writing attempts on my laptop. Sometimes I open it to see if there’s something I can salvage, but there isn’t. The words are stilted, the ideas half-baked and the metaphors excruciating (I just peeked into the folder and found a line that likened the movement of blood to “splintering”, which makes no sense whatsoever and sounds bloody painful). But clumsiness is where this starts. Your sentences will come out crooked and your metaphors will limp but that’s fine. They’re only the first sparks. Nothing is going to burst into glorious flame immediately.

Let the writing stumble. Let it be unashamedly messy. The point isn’t grace: it’s movement. Write something then put it in a folder labelled ‘Trash Writing’ if it helps. You never have to look at it again if you don’t want to, but you can at least say you’ve written something today.

Still stuck? Set your timer for twenty minutes and write the worst possible thing you can. You’ll find it’s harder than you think. And if you do end up writing something terrible…well, congratulations! You’ve won the game.

Now move it into the Trash Writing folder and move on.

2. Write about the small things

There’s no need to begin with something grand and there’s no need to reach for a perfect story or poem, or whatever it is you choose to write today. Start with what’s close, what’s real. Write about the texture of the morning sky, the way your coffee tastes like burnt almonds today, the baffling ache in your left shoulder. Write something tiny that no one else needs to see.

Small things are enough. They’re the small, ticking engines of memory and meaning. Maybe they’ll lead to something bigger. Maybe they won’t. Either way, it doesn’t matter. The more of these little moments you write about, the more chance you have that it’ll inspire something greater.

Asking “So what?” really helps here. What happens next? Who’s looking at that sky? What’s on their mind? Why have they left their coffee go cold? When did you first notice an ache like the one in your shoulder?

Get curious. Ask more. Trust where it takes you.

3. Steal something for your writing

I’m not talking about full-blown plagiarism. Steal a sentence, a mood or a memory. You don’t need to start fresh. You don’t need to research something totally obscure. Often, the best writing is about what you know best.

Take that dream you had last night; you know, the one where you were swimming in syrup. Or that time your neighbour’s burglar alarm screeched across the road at 3am and you woke with a start, fully believing the apocalypse had arrived unexpectedly. Take the last words you ever said to your ex and turn them into the start of a dialogue.

You can steal shamelessly from your own life, your own obsessions or overheard conversations (without including identifiable information of course). What you need isn’t more knowledge. What you need is bravery to begin. So, as soon as you finish this paragraph, take 10 minutes to write something – anything. A dream you had. A lie you told. A moment from the past that haunts you. Just write something.

Again, move it to your trusty folder if you feel strongly that you’d never like to look at it again.

4. Treat your confidence like a stubborn houseplant

Confidence needs a lot of nurturing, especially after a hiatus. There’s a peace plant on my bathroom windowsill that has stubbornly refused to unfurl its leaves until very recently, after weeks of being moved, watered and begged to thrive once more.

Your writing confidence is like this. It takes time. But those leaves will unfurl eventually and it will reward you again.

Your confidence doesn’t want a deluge or it will drown. And it doesn’t want to be ignored entirely, or it will simply wilt. What it needs is patience and consistent care.

Start with small, manageable goals: 10 minutes of writing a day, perhaps on your lunch break or just after you finish work. Give yourself permission to have a dedicated quiet session, no matter how short it is, where you can write something only for your eyes. Jot down ideas. Make mind maps. Experiment with dialogues. Play with the written word.

Over time, and with consistency, your confidence will begin to grow again. 

(I have high hopes for my peace plant.)

5. Trust the cycle of creative seasons

Hilary Mantel once said: “You don’t write by sitting down to write. You write by sitting down to think.” She describes this as a kind of “passive thinking”, where the real creative work is happening at a level just beneath your awareness. Even when you’re not hitting word counts, those ideas are still unravelling beautifully underneath like tender roots, unnoticed by the panicking writer staring at the horizon.

Creativity, like nature, is organic, slow, and often messy. It asks us to be patient with ourselves, to trust in the quiet work happening beneath the surface, even when nothing seems to be taking shape. Ideas, like roots, need time to anchor themselves, to draw in what they need to grow.

There’s a kind of beauty and quiet humility in acknowledging that much of creativity remains unseen. The roots, tirelessly gathering nourishment and stretching deeper into the soil, do their work in silence. As writers, there’s something of us in those plants, relying on the unseen strength of our roots to sustain us through droughts of inspiration and the weight of self-doubt.

Creativity, like the natural world, has its own rhythm, its own seasons. The roots are always growing, even when you can’t see them. And when the time is right – when they’ve gathered enough strength and nourishment – they will break through the surface. 

Remember, you’re a writer

Writing after a long silence isn’t about mastery. It isn’t about proving you’re still good at this, or that you ever were. It’s about showing up, facing the empty page and saying, I’m here.

The words don’t need you to be confident. They don’t need you to be brilliant. They just need you to begin. Write the clumsy sentences. Write the small, forgettable things. Write through the awkwardness and the fear and the doubt.

No one cares about your excuses. No one’s keeping a ledger of the years you didn’t write. The only person who can hold you hostage to your own guilt is you. So forgive yourself, please. Then pick up your pen.