The Benefits of Taking a Writing Break
"The reality is that I’m only human..."
Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.
In December 2017 I submitted an essay to a lit mag about maintaining self-esteem in the face of rejection. I wrote it at the end of a discouraging year, one where I couldn’t place any of the short stories and poems I’d sent out. Looking back at the essay, it seems I’d also applied to a couple residencies. I can’t tell you which ones—I’ve long since forgotten. But years on, I’m impressed with my ambition. Also surprising to the 2025 me is that I weighed in on the classic writer’s strategy of aiming for 100 rejections in one year—the idea being that it increases your chances of getting accepted. I confess I didn’t go on to try this.
The essay was quickly accepted. I remember being thrilled, not just because the acceptance finally broke my “losing streak,” but because the lit mag was (and still is) a respectable journal.
If I walk a little farther down memory lane I can recall that I was indeed pretty ambitious about my writing in those days. I worked full-time in an office, and sometimes I’d bring a hard-copy draft to work on during my lunch hour or on my bus commute. Yes, fellow cubicle drones, that annoying striver scribbling away in the corner of the lunchroom while everyone else chatted about their kids and pets or just chilled out and enjoyed their break–that person was me.
If I keep walking, I can remember other evidence of my old ambition. A screensaver of a flowchart for writers in which every arrow leads to the message “Keep writing.” Facebook posts quoting bits of encouragement. (A favorite is one by the great Chilean novelist Isabel Allende: “Show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”) Morning exercises written at the command of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Sticky notes on my desktop monitor admonishing me to just write already.
I’m sure many Lit Mag News readers can relate. Writers so often hear advice that leans toward productivity. Write every day. Discipline your flow. Submit strategically but often.
These bits of advice are undoubtedly time-tested and get results. But are they always realistic or even healthy? Life, after all, very often “gets in the way.” And as important as it is to practice self-discipline and self-advocacy, to establish a daily writing practice and insist on your right to write without distractions, isn’t it just as important to give yourself, and your work, some breathing room? To just take a break?
As important as it is to practice self-discipline and self-advocacy, to establish a daily writing practice and insist on your right to write without distractions, isn’t it just as important to give yourself, and your work, some breathing room?
I’ve been thinking about this as someone who has been taking long breaks between writing, pitching, completing, and submitting work the past few years. When I wrote that 2017 essay, I was in my 40s and had already been through more than one career pivot. A late bloomer, I’d been an aspiring writer since I was a kid, but it had taken me forever (meaning, until my 30s) to scrape up the necessary self-esteem to start sending out my work anywhere. I’m sure that a big part of my ambition was me trying to make up for lost time, to make my mark as a writer before anything I had to say was deemed irrelevant, dismissed as the out-of-touch ramblings of an aging, failed writer.
Now, in my 50s, I still worry about having missed the boat. But other, more pressing worries have taken precedence. Since 2017 there have been toxic job situations to extricate myself from, requiring more pivots. During the pandemic my elderly parents’ health and the general state of the world kept me up at night far more often than any unfinished writing project did. In 2022 my father’s health declined rapidly and another family member required a kidney transplant. At the end of the year I became her donor. At the start of 2023 my wonderful father passed away. Somewhere in the middle of all this I lost a few beloved pets and went through menopause.
For a while I planned to write about it. Part of me needed to. I have a number of half-finished writing projects that I am determined to complete and send out into the world. But life–and grieving–have gotten in the way.
Sometimes I do think I’ve entered the “failed writer” stage of life, and maybe that’s where I’ve landed for good. The reality is that I’m only human, and I haven’t reached the “failed writer” stage but the “sandwich generation” stage, the name for those of us who reach mid-life and suddenly find ourselves lost in a dark wood of work demands, family care, and (very often) the kind of personal health issues that emerge only after hitting 40 or 50.
I can let myself feel guilty about this, about being human and having family to look after and mourn, and I can push myself to the breaking point to finish a project. I can send out half-baked work to convince myself I’m being productive (when I’m really just advertising what an amateur I am to lit mag editors).
Or I can just give myself, and my writing, a break.
There is some historical basis for this strategy, for the wisdom of taking a project or writing break.
In 1876 Mark Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. At the time, he was 41 years old and the father of two daughters, one 4 and the other 2. Just a few years earlier he and his wife had buried their first child–an infant son whose death the deeply grieved parents could barely speak about for the rest of their lives.
Despite these midlife sorrows and responsibilities, Twain began writing a sequel to Tom Sawyer. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn poured out of him in a rush of productivity–until it didn’t. He stopped at chapter 18, telling his friend William Dean Howells that he liked his work-in-progress “only tolerably well” and might just burn the thing when and if he finished it. Turning to other projects, Twain shelved Huck Finn for three years, returned to it, and took another three-year break before finally finishing it in 1883. The American edition of the book was published two years later. By that time Twain had turned 50 and he’d had another child.
Today many people consider Huck Finn the Great American Novel. No, Twain didn’t quit writing altogether during its creation. But the significant breaks he took from it should tell us something about the realities of creativity and the writing process. And perhaps make us question the benefits of forced productivity.
Creative types and perfectionists are often told, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” As someone with a tendency of working myself up into a state of anxiety while writing, to the point of fussing over plot points and giving up in self-defeat because I can’t make the words “come out right,” this adage has always helped me move forward. But as a reformed literary striver, I’d like to add to the list of writerly wisdom, “Don’t let productivity be the enemy of the good.”
The fact that Twain did find his way back to Huck Finn also gives me hope. In this age of “30 Under 30” and “Young Writers to Watch” lists, it inspires me to know that the Great American Novel was not a dashed-off sequel or the hyped-up debut novel of a wunderkind but the long-labored work of a middle-aged parent. Despite the demands of Twain’s life, something about the story must have made him determined to finish it—but in the time he needed to take.
No, I’m not Mark Twain, and my unfinished pieces are unlikely to become the next Great American Novel. But if taking a break was the best option for one of American literature’s GOATs, who am I to pretend I don’t need one too from time to time?
Life and the state of the world still keep me up at night. My unfinished stories don’t, but they do linger in my mind. So I go back to them every now and then and add ideas that I don’t want to forget. I want to know how they end, and that curiosity—more than unhealthy ambition or any push for productivity—assures me that I’ll always return to writing.
 | A guest post by
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I just came back from a 19-day road trip, some of which involved writing with Murphy Writing Seminars at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida. My lover brought two copies of The Iowa Review, in which I’d placed a story, which he bought to give to two of the people we visited on our trip back. Toward the end of that trip I received my 42nd rejection of a story that I printed out and got to work on, revising it so as to send it out to three more literary magazines. At one of our meals with one of our friends, this very supportive man repeated the lament of the poet whose workshop he’d attended, that we send pieces out over and over again for little or no compensation in the hope that enough people still get their stories from reading (as opposed to movies, series and games). I felt a pang in my chest. It sounded so much like that definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. He apologized for hurting my feelings. But it wasn’t that. It was the reminder that what I’m doing—what we’re doing—is damn near impossible. I once tried to give up writing. I missed it, far more than I miss teaching, the day job that supported me for 35+years. And I loved teaching. Writing in this youth culture in your fifties? Try seventies, when I’m writing better than I ever did—and have more to write about. Life experience was, of course, more valuable than writing about it: childbirth, falling in love at seventy, all those students who impressed me in some way, travel. Sometimes I wonder if we aren’t all a little bit insane. And here I am, writing about it.
30under30, Young Writers To Watch and Best British Novelists Under 40 are all symptoms of a youth-worshipping culture that's been prevalent since 1955 and is now in decline. I just had my first collection of short stories published at 55 and five years after my last book; I have two other books slated for publication. I could go further than your Twain and advance you Daniel Defoe, who didn't write, let alone publish, til 60, or Goethe, whose masterpiece came when he was in his eighties. Or Emily Dickinson or John Donne, who never published at all in their lifetimes. Ignore the whole damn lot of them and do as you please. Blessings and power to you.