Writing Through the Holidays

Finding Your Words When the World Gets Loud

November arrives with its own particular urgency. The days grow shorter, the to-do lists grow longer, and suddenly we’re caught in that strange space between the year we’re finishing and the one we’re already planning. For writers, this season can feel especially fraught—how do we protect our creative practice when everything around us demands our attention?

The answer isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing differently.

Give Yourself Permission to Write Badly

Here’s the truth: your November pages don’t have to be your best pages. They just have to exist.

This is the season to lower the bar, not raise it. If you’ve been working on a challenging revision, maybe November is the month you give yourself permission to freewrite instead. If you’ve been pushing yourself to write daily, maybe three times a week is enough right now. The goal is to keep your hand in, to maintain the relationship with your work, even if that relationship looks different than it did in October.

Remember: you’re not abandoning your writing practice by adapting it. You’re honoring it by making it sustainable.

Steal the Small Moments

Holiday season writing rarely happens in those perfect two-hour blocks we dream about. Instead, it lives in the margins: fifteen minutes before the guests arrive, a half-hour in the quiet morning before anyone else wakes up, ten minutes of notes on your phone while waiting in the carpool line.

These fragments matter. They add up. And sometimes, the constraint of limited time actually sharpens our focus in surprising ways. Try it: set a timer for twenty minutes. Write one scene, one memory, one paragraph. Then close the notebook and move on with your day. You might be amazed at what emerges when you stop waiting for ideal conditions.

Mine the Season for Material

The holidays are rich with story. Family dynamics crystallize around dinner tables. Old resentments surface alongside the pie. There’s comedy, tragedy, tenderness, and absurdity—often all at the same time.

As a writer, you have permission to observe. To notice. To take mental notes (or real ones, if you can slip away for a moment). You’re not being cold or detached; you’re doing what writers do. We pay attention. We bear witness. And later—maybe in January, maybe next November—those observations become the raw material of our work.

Protect Your Creative Energy

Here’s something we don’t talk about enough: holiday gatherings can be emotionally depleting, and emotional depletion is the enemy of creative work. If you know that hosting Thanksgiving dinner will leave you drained for three days, plan accordingly. Maybe you don’t schedule writing time for those three days. Maybe you use that time to read instead, to refill the well.

There’s no virtue in pushing yourself past exhaustion. The words will still be there when you come back to them, but you need to be there too—present, alive, with something left to give.

Find Your Writing Community

One of the best parts of being in a writing community like Project Write Now is knowing you’re not alone in this struggle. When you’re tempted to let your practice slide until January, remember: your fellow writers are navigating these same challenges. Check in with each other. Share what’s working (and what isn’t). Sometimes just knowing that someone else understands makes all the difference.

Consider joining a weekly class or a one-day workshop for accountability throughout the holidays.

Remember Why You Started

When the season feels overwhelming, come back to this: you write because you need to. Not because you should, not because of any external deadline or expectation, but because something in you requires expression. That need doesn’t disappear just because it’s November. If anything, it may be amplified.

Your writing practice is a gift you give yourself. In a season of giving to everyone else, don’t forget to give yourself this, too.

The holidays will end. The new year will arrive. And you want to greet it not with guilt about all the writing you didn’t do, but with the quiet satisfaction of having stayed connected to your work, even imperfectly, even in small ways.

Your future self—the one sitting down to write in January (maybe as part of the Memoir or Novel Incubator)—will thank you for not abandoning the practice entirely. Keep showing up. Keep finding the words. Keep writing.