To say that 2025 has been a mentally taxing year would be something of an understatement. Actually, 2025 has been a mentally taxing decade and that we still have three months left of it is not especially helpful. Looking back thus far on my year it’s hard to believe that this is the same year that I started challenging myself to read more books that I had in recent memory (I’m up to 13 and my ratio of good books to bad books hasn’t improved very much).

My birthday was only a week ago and the temp job that I had ending was technically only two months ago. It’s hard to believe how long ago all of that feels now. It’s also hard to believe that I actually finished writing the first book I’ve completed in almost five years already three months ago. I’ve written a lot so far this month, 36,000 words, not my highest month so far this year but still a far cry from my best month ever which was last June. Actually last year was my best writing year ever.

From August 2023 to August of 2024, I managed to write one million words. That amounts to about 80,000 words per month on average or about a Novel Month (50,000) and a half every month for twelve months. It was an exciting accomplishment for me because while I am certain I had written more than a million words in general over the course of my writing career, I have never written them in the span of a single year before (at least not to my knowledge). In fact because I didn’t even realize how close I was to hitting that goal until June of 2024, I actually had to write more than that to actually meet the total word count goal on time and during the last two weeks of June I wrote about 119,000 words just in that two week period. I still have no idea how I managed it.

Hitting that million word goal felt like a milestone, and the fact that I’d done it on accident was all the more exciting. I felt like surely I could keep up that momentum right? Surely I could do it again, and on purpose this time…

Well, not quite. See the moment I managed to actually finish with my accidental Millwordy challenge, I found myself kind of stuck. For the rest of the year I felt stagnant. I was exhausted. And due to circumstances beyond my control the start of 2025 didn’t fare much better.

No matter how long you’ve been a writer, no matter how much you have written, or how frequently you write in general, we all have moments where we get stuck. Moments where something isn’t working. The story, the chapter, something you’re working on just isn’t quite right.

You don’t know why, and the more that you try to think about it, the more that you try to fix the problem, the more stuck that you become. Like struggling in quicksand. The harder you fight the worse it gets.
It keeps you up at night, if you’re anything like me, you start to feel frustrated with yourself. Especially if you were on a roll prior to this moment. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been working on a project and I’ve been on a hot streak and then something happens, something changes and suddenly that hot streak is gone. Whatever it was that I was working on, whatever it was that I felt so confident in and sure of myself suddenly it’s over and my brain feels completely stuck.

Going from writing 119,000 words over the course of two weeks in June, to writing less than 20,000 that September, was hugely depressing for me. I didn’t understand what had happened. I was doing great before, why now? Why was I faltering after writing a million words?

The thing that I’ve learned, and that I constantly try to remind myself is that some months are going to be better than others. Some weeks are going to be better than others, some days are going to be better than others.

I’ve tried to analyze what times I write best. I’ve always assumed it was the fall (since I loathe the summer and often feel as though I need to sleep as the summer equivalent of seasonal exhaustion kicks in)—and yet looking back on my many writing trackers it’s hard to gain any kind of consistency. Back in 2020 when I kept track somewhat better… January through March were my best months. This past year, August was— so far— my best month. The year before June was my best month. At least as far as word count goes.

A lot of writing advice will tell you that in order to be a good writer you should write every single day, and while I do think that writing often and trying to have a schedule when it comes to writing is valuable, I don’t necessarily subscribe to the theory that writing everyday is necessary. In fact I would go so far as to argue that it’s a recipe for disappointment if you try to force yourself to, because invariably you are going to find yourself in a situation where you feel stuck, and it feels frustrating and you feel like you should be writing every day and that’s only going to make things worse.

The good news is, even being stuck doesn’t last forever.
No matter how long you have been stuck, no matter how frustrating it is, and I know that it is especially if you love it because you want to be doing this, you want to write; it will come back.

There are tips and tricks for when you get stuck. There are writing exercises that you can do… every writer is different for what works for them. Some writers require space, some require noise or silence, or a different atmosphere entirely. Sometimes I think I would write best if I were in a cabin in the woods somewhere.

Sometimes it just requires you to take some time away from what you’re working on and come back to it. Maybe it means re-reading what you were working on, and re-evaluating a scene or a sentence, or maybe you need to refill your creative tank by reading more. Sometimes you just need rest.

The reality of making art is that you need a certain level of security in order to do it. You need a certain level of comfort and safety in order to be able to create and it can be very hard during times of great turmoil like the ones we find ourselves in now.

It’s not impossible, but it requires being able to find peace and find joy and take a breath and sometimes it means resting. Taking a break and stepping away for a bit. Sometimes it means stepping away from social media and calming your nerves so that you’re not constantly bouncing between the alarming highs and crashing lows that is the constant stream of horrifying news.

The good news is you can do it. I believe in you, and I know that you will create again. You will write, you will make art, you will be able to get back to what you love doing. It may not be today, it may not be tomorrow, but soon you will create again. Give yourself a little grace today, because it’s so easy to get frustrated with yourself, it’s so easy to want to get annoyed with yourself for struggling but that isn’t going to make you more successful. It isn’t going to help you out in the long run and it isn’t going to make you any less stuck than you were yesterday.
It takes time.
And it takes patience.
But you will get there, I promise you that.