How to come back to a manuscript after months away

Almost every book has a gap in it somewhere. A new job, a baby, an illness, a move, a bad review of something else, or simply a long stretch where the writing stopped feeling possible. The draft sits in a folder, and every week it is untouched it gets a little harder to open.

Coming back is a skill, and it is a different skill from writing. The first sitting back is rarely about words; it is about finding your way into the book again without being flattened by it. Here is a way to do that, in roughly the order that helps.

Forgive the gap first

The hardest part of returning is usually the feeling about the gap, not the gap itself. It is easy to treat the months away as evidence that you are not a real writer, or that the book was never going to work.

Neither follows. Plenty of books are written in bursts with long silences between them, and the silences often do useful work: you come back knowing things about the story that you could not see while you were inside it. Decide, deliberately, that the gap is over and needs no apology. The book does not know how long you were gone.

Read the plan before the draft

The instinct is to open chapter one and read the whole draft from the start. For a short draft that can work. For a long one, it usually goes badly: you meet your oldest, roughest pages first, the urge to fix them is overwhelming, and three weeks later you have a polished opening and no more book than before.

Start with whatever plan you have instead. An outline, a synopsis, the scene list, your notes, even the chapter titles. You are trying to remember the shape of the book, not its sentences: where it starts, where it is going, and roughly where you stopped. If you never had a plan, make a rough one now, a line per chapter, from what you remember. The guide to outlining a novel in an afternoon has a quick way to do it.

Write a where-we-are note

Before you write any of the book, write a short note to yourself, a paragraph or two, answering three questions:

1. What is this book about, in a sentence or two, as you understand it now?
2. Where did the draft stop, and what was about to happen?
3. What do you already know you want to change?

The third answer is the important one. You will have ideas the moment you look at the book again: a character who should be older, a subplot that needs to go, an ending that has shifted. Write them all down here, as a list, and leave them there. They are revision notes, not instructions for today.

Reread only the last chapter

Now read the last chapter or two you wrote, and nothing else. They are closest to where you need to start, they carry the voice and the tone you were writing in, and they are short enough to read in one sitting without starting to edit.

Read them as a reader, not an editor. If something jars, add it to the list in your note and keep going. You are listening for the sound of the book so that the next sentence you write sounds like it belongs.

Start with a small scene

The first scene back does not have to be the next scene in order, and it does not have to be important. It is better if it is neither. Pick something small and clear that you can see already: a conversation you know the shape of, a short moment between two characters, a scene that has been in your head during the gap.

Write it in one sitting, badly if need be. A finished small scene does more for your confidence than a brilliant opening paragraph of a difficult one. If nothing comes, try one of the writing prompts with one of your own characters in it; a prompt gives you a door in without asking you to decide where the book goes next.

Set a goal for a bad week

When you come back to a book, it is tempting to make up for lost time with an ambitious target. That target usually lasts about four days.

Choose a pace you could keep in your worst week instead, and let the good weeks run over it. The guide to daily word goals explains how to pick that number, and the word goal calculator will tell you what it means for a finish date. A small goal you keep is how a returning writer turns one good sitting into a habit again.

Make the next sitting easy to start

The sittings after the first one matter as much, and the main enemy is friction: finding the file, finding your place, remembering what the scene was for. Before you stop each day, leave yourself a line at the end of the scene saying what happens next. It makes the next start almost automatic.

Many writers also find it helps to keep the sittings short and regular at first, fifteen or twenty minutes at the same time of day, rather than waiting for a free afternoon. Short sittings are easier to protect, and they keep the book in your head between them.

What to do about everything you want to fix

By the end of your first week back, the list of things you want to change will be long. That is a good sign: it means you see the book more clearly than you did. Resist the urge to start fixing it while the draft is unfinished. Every revision you make to a half-written book may be undone by what happens in the other half.

Finish the draft first, then work through the list. The guide to revising a first draft in three passes describes an order for doing it that saves you from polishing scenes you will later cut.

In Author Sweets

When you open the Library, Continue writing takes you to the scene you were in, and the Today line shows the words you have written today across every book, so the first sitting back starts on the page rather than in a file browser. A word target and a finish date in Book settings show how many words a day keep the book on time, and you can change them whenever your life does.

The book keeps automatic versions as you write, on every plan, so you can make the big changes on your list later knowing the earlier draft is still there to compare against. If your draft lives in another program, Scribe and above can import it from Word, Scrivener, EPUB, Markdown or plain text.