Push Through or Press Pause? How to Know What Your Writing Life Needs Right Now
This post was adapted from Writing Off Social: The Podcast, Episode 93.
Lately, we keep having the same conversation. A writer reaches out — someone who genuinely loves her work, who feels called to it — and she’s tired. The kind of tired that comes from pouring yourself into motherhood, work, church, community, and relationships, and then trying to also show up as a writer out of whatever is left.
If that’s you right now, we want you to know: we see you, we hear you, and honestly — we are you.
Why Tired Writers Aren’t Just “Too Busy”
Good writing draws from your whole self — your attention, your emotional reserves, your curiosity, your spiritual vitality, your physical health. When most of those wells are running dry, the writing reflects it. That’s not a discipline failure. That’s just reality.
And we all know women carry a tremendous cognitive load. Even writers who technically have time to write may not have the mental capacity to write. There’s a difference between hours on a calendar and actual bandwidth. Decision fatigue, emotional labor, invisible project management running constantly in the background — all of it costs something.
The question we want to sit with today isn’t “How do I become a productivity machine when I’m already depleted?” It’s something more honest: how do we build a sustainable creative life inside the already-full life we actually have?
We’ve landed on two questions that we think can help.
Question One: What Is the Root of My Resistance?
Not all writing resistance is the same, and that matters — because the right response depends entirely on what’s driving it.
Sometimes resistance comes from things like fear, perfectionism, distraction, or plain old avoidance. Fear of failure, fear of looking foolish, waiting for ideal conditions that will never arrive. If this is where you are, you need a gentle push. Write tired. Write imperfectly. Start smaller than feels significant. Ideal conditions are not coming, and something is genuinely better than nothing.
But sometimes the resistance isn’t avoidance at all. Sometimes it’s your body and soul waving a white flag. Depletion, grief, illness, burnout, depression — these are signals, not character flaws. If this is you, you need permission to press pause.
And pause doesn’t have to mean stop. It might mean scaling down, extending your timeline, trading output for input for a season. A writer in survival mode may not have capacity for a weekly newsletter, a book proposal, or a podcast. But she may still have capacity for voice memos, morning pages, handwritten observations, or deep reading. A good question to ask yourself here: What is the smallest sustainable writing rhythm for this season?
Question Two: What Writing Season Am I In?
We recently came across an idea — through Jennifer Dukes Lee on the That Sounds Fun podcast — that we haven’t been able to stop thinking about: the farming seasons, and what they might mean for our creative lives.
To state the obvious, farming is cyclical, not linear. And almost all of the seasons look unproductive to someone who misunderstands them: planting looks small, growing looks passive, winter looks dead . . . . But every single season is essential to eventual harvest.
Planting Season
Planting is labor-intensive and often discouraging because there’s so little visible return. For newer writers, this might mean learning craft, building rhythms, and creating before there’s much evidence it’s working. For more established writers, it can mean pivoting, starting something new, or rebuilding what’s been depleted — curiosity, attentiveness, a reading life, spiritual energy.
One important note: a farmer doesn’t plant forever. At some point, you stop preparing the soil and let the seed do what seeds do. If you’re in a planting season and wondering if you should press pause or press through, the answer is usually to push through — knowing this season has an end.
Growing Season
This season is the hardest for writers conditioned by social media, because growth here is invisible. Roots are deepening. Your voice is maturing. Your work is taking root in ways you can’t yet measure. From the outside, it can feel painfully unimpressive — and this is the season most writers want to burn it all down.
Don’t. If you’re in a growing season, the answer is to remain faithful and tend what you’ve planted.
Harvest Season
Harvest is joyful — and also exhausting, which people tend to forget. For the farmer, harvest is urgent, demanding, and time-sensitive. In a writer’s life, harvest looks like a book launch, a speaking season, major deadlines, media appearances, or enrollment periods. It’s the season when long-hidden labor finally becomes visible, when your work goes out into the world and starts conversations.
It’s okay to enjoy this. Farmers celebrate harvest, and Scripture is full of that celebration language. A healthy harvest season isn’t “look what I achieved” — it’s “look what God grew.”
But harvest isn’t sustainable year-round. If you’re in it right now, push through — and then build in rest on the other side.
Winter / Fallow Season
This is the season modern culture misunderstands most. A fallow field isn’t abandoned — it’s intentionally resting so it can be fruitful again. Historically, farmers left fields to lie fallow because constantly extracting from the soil depleted it. The land needed restoration.
For writers, a fallow season might involve less output, hidden healing, deep reading, prayer, caregiving, or simply living real life instead of constantly producing content from it. One of the healthiest rhythms a writer can build is regular rest — a weekly sabbath, a seasonal step back, a genuine exhale after a launch or sprint.
One More Nuance Worth Naming
Different parts of a farm can be in different seasons simultaneously. A real farmer might have one field being planted, one growing, one at harvest, one at rest — all at the same time.
You might, too. Maybe your podcast is flourishing while your book manuscript is stalled. Maybe your spiritual life feels rich while your creative energy is depleted. So the question isn’t always “what season am I in?” — it might be “what season is this particular area in?”
We know some of you are reading this from a place of genuine exhaustion, wondering if you should keep going at all. You are not alone. Writing is hard even in good circumstances, and most of us are not in good circumstances right now.
So here’s our encouragement: take some time this week to pray and sit with these two questions. What is the root of the resistance I’m feeling? And what writing season am I in? Whatever the answers reveal, our prayer is that God gives you the grace and courage to take the next right step — whether that’s pushing back on the resistance and doing the work, or trusting His sovereignty and pressing pause.
This post was reformatted from our original transcript by Claude and edited for accuracy by Mary K.
