If you’ve stepped away from your novel-in-progress for a few weeks or months and are now feeling ready to get back to work, you’re in the right place.
Because I know just how you feel. Getting started again—even when you want to—can feel overwhelming.
Here are a few different ways to ease yourself back into it.
Review your most recent draft and/or notes
In other words, read what you’ve already written.
Reading is fun. It’s a low stress way to remind yourself what your story is about and what your characters were up to the last time you saw them.
If you’ve got a partial or full draft, you have options for how much you read.
You can start all the way back at the beginning.
Or … especially if you know you’ll bog yourself down with doubt, you can start reading 5 or 10 pages from where you stopped writing.
Say you made it to page 57. Start on page 52 or 47.
Then read forward. Is that enough to remind you of what you were thinking about with your protagonist?
If not, go back a little further.
And if you are a notes taker or a journal keeper or both, reread your notes and/or journal.
While I was at Highlights in 2025, I handwrote in my special green journal. My notes included ideas from my meetings with my faculty reader and my Brain Trust group.
Rereading those thoughts months later about the changes I’d been considering for my rewrite was a calm and simple way to get my brain back into story mode.
What ideas from your rereading—either your draft, your notes, or your journal—still resonate? Jot them down. That’s one small action you can take to inch yourself forward.
Take baby steps
Getting back into a manuscript doesn’t mean you have to spend hours a day. You can spend 5 minutes on it and that still counts!
That can be 5 minutes of brainstorming about where your story has gone off the rails (if you think it has) or how much more suffering your main character needs to endure (if he/she/they/it does).
That can be freewriting for 5 minutes or 100 words or 200 words.
It can be a mini character interview with a character you don’t know as well as you need to. (Not sure how to do a character interview? Check out my freebie below.)
The action is what matters here. Action begets action. It kick starts your story imagination, which makes you even more eager to take action.
One of the notes I reread had to do with a secondary character in my dog novel. A dog I’d not spent much time with. She was more of a plot device than a character, so I decided to interview her. She’s becoming much more significant in my rewrite—the yin to my main character’s yang.
Use a craft book as a workbook
Having a lesson plan to follow is something I love because it helps me know what to do next. Knowing what comes next also helps me to stay on track and maintain progress. (FYI, this is also something a book coach helps with 😉.)
One craft book I recommend and use myself is Story Genius by Lisa Cron. Cron’s approach to character, emotion, and story and how they’re all connected resonates with me (and my approach to book coaching).
No matter where you are with your revision, you’ll likely find at least some of Cron’s exercises useful.
Be sure to take your time when you work on exercises. Let yourself mull over your responses. Dig deep for answers. Don’t settle for the quick and easy ones.
Crafting a novel that you feel strongly about and that has an important point to make for your kid or teen audience, isn’t a fast activity.
Nor is it a straight climb. It’s more of a circuitous route through the wilderness.
Learn how to interview your characters
One key to writing exceptional fiction is creating great characters. Whether they’re smart or dim, sweet or mean, funny or sad, great characters stay with readers long after they’ve finished the book.
Why? Because great characters create emotional resonance for readers, which makes them fall in love with a book.
Let me introduce you to Write Great Characters: Simple steps to make your novel stronger and more publishable.
Download this free guide and immerse yourself in the hearts and minds of your characters.
