Set Your Writing Life to Your Own Rhythm

Not long ago, I made a discovery about myself that felt embarrassingly overdue. I had been in publishing for over a decade, had built a company, was coaching writers and closing deals, and I was still operating as though my energy was a flat line—consistent, available, renewable on demand. It wasn't. It never had been. I had just been too busy, too ambitious, and honestly too stubborn to notice.

What I eventually noticed—once I got still enough to pay attention—was a pattern that had been running in the background of my life for years. Every fourth quarter, I feel the pull to slow down and go inward. Every end of the month, I hit a few days of depletion that no amount of caffeine or calendar reorganization could push through. For years I treated those seasons like malfunctions. I guilt-tripped myself through them. I kept showing up at the same pace and wondered why the work felt like dragging something heavy uphill.

It turns out I wasn't malfunctioning. I was cycling. And once I understood that, everything changed.

Our creative lives have a rhythm. It was designed that way. God set cycles and seasons into motion at creation—weekly, monthly, yearly—and our bodies, spirits, and creativity are all connected to those rhythms whether we acknowledge them or not. The question is whether we're working with them or against them. For most of my early career, I was working against mine, and I was paying for it in ways I didn't fully understand until I stopped.

The women in my family who were furthest along in life already knew this. They had a genius for sitting still when the rest of us were circling and scrambling. "I'mma let y'all wear yourselves out," one of my aunts would say, settling back in her chair while we fussed over whatever had us wound up that day. There was no malice in it. Just the earned wisdom of a woman who had already learned what I was still in the process of refusing to learn. She was in the Fall of her life. She knew how to receive the harvest. I was in the Spring of mine, spending energy like I had an endless supply.

I didn't, and you don't either.

For women writers, this matters in a particular way. Writing asks you to be interior. It asks you to be present to your own thoughts, patient with ideas that take time to develop, willing to sit with something unfinished until it becomes what it's supposed to be. You cannot do that well when you are depleted. You can force words onto a page, but you know the difference between writing that comes from a full place and writing that comes from an empty one. Your reader will know it too.

So here is what I'd encourage you to do: start paying attention. Not in a complicated way—just notice. Notice when you feel most alive creatively, when ideas come easily, when the work feels like flow. And notice when it doesn't. Notice the seasons of your year and the rhythms of your month. Notice what you reach for when you're depleted and whether it actually refills you or just distracts you.

Over the years I've learned that what refills me looks nothing like what the productivity world says rest should look like. It's quiet. It's sensory. It's working with my hands, wandering somewhere beautiful, sitting outside and watching people live their lives, picking up a magazine about something completely outside of books and publishing. It's getting to the people who love me without any expectation attached to that love. None of that looks like output. All of it makes the output possible.

Your rhythm may look completely different from mine. That's the point. The work is learning what yours actually is—not what you think it should be, not what works for the writer you follow online, but what your own body, spirit, and creative life are actually asking for.

Psalm 90:12 asks to be taught to number our days so that we might gain a heart of wisdom. I've prayed that verse. I mean it when I pray it. And I've come to understand that part of that wisdom is learning to receive what the seasons of your life are telling you, rather than spending your energy fighting them.

Your rhythm is not a liability. It's not an excuse or a weakness or something to overcome. It's information. And when you finally learn to set your writing life to it, you'll wonder how you ever worked any other way.

What does your creative rhythm look like? Are you paying attention to it? Tell me in the comments. I'd love to know.