Inviting creativity back in
and making space for it
I found myself staring at a blank document earlier this week, not for the first time this month. Outside my window, the sky was doing that thing where it can't decide between clouds and sunshine.
Five books published, and here I was, feeling like a complete beginner again. My tea had gone cold, my timer ignored long ago. The rituals that once carried me through draft after draft now felt like empty gestures, the creative equivalent of muscle memory without the muscle.
‘This is what it’s like coming back from a break’ is what I told myself. But really, I’ve been re-learning how to write for a while.
Five published books (and 10+ written) into this writing career, and I'm finally learning that different seasons require different rituals.
When I wrote my first book, my creativity felt like an unstoppable current. It kept me up at night and I could feel the story pouring out of me. I wrote with the confidence of someone who didn't know how much they didn't know. My rituals then were dramatic—late nights, feverish typing, the romantic chaos of ‘art’.
Book two came with expectations. Book three with deadlines during the beginning of COVID. Book four with a new genre and new anxieties. By book five, I realized the well was running dry. Not because I had less to say, but because I had forgotten how to listen.
It's strange how achieving your goals can distance you from the very thing that brought you there. The industry machinery—the cyclical rejection, the incessant admin, the social media of it all—had slowly replaced the small, quiet moments that once fed my writing practice.
So I began again this month. Not with grand gestures, but with paying attention.
I heard a song I hadn’t heard in a while, a singular lyric sticking with me in a way it never had before. It cracked open a character I've been struggling to understand for months. I wrote three pages in my notes app. It happened again at a wedding, where I hastily tried to capture a momentary feeling, a thought, that had coursed through me as I watched two people commit to each other. A new scene popped up in my head for a story idea I’ve been percolating for years.
Then, while walking the same route I always take, I spotted a red poppy growing through a crack in the sidewalk. Its resilience—the sheer audacity of insisting on existence in a concrete world—made me think of what it meant to be resilient, to be human. I took a photo not to post, but to remember.
This wasn’t how I thought I’d get back into writing, but it’s what happened.
Life is harder now in ways I couldn't have anticipated when I signed that first book contract. The world's weight feels heavier. And yet, stories still want to be told. Characters still whisper. The work remains.
So I've built new rituals.
I keep an '“Ideas" note on my phone—a collection of overheard conversations, strange signs, lyrics that stop me in my tracks. There’s no pressure to use them but collecting those little bits of my day, of wonder, allows me to remember that there are still worlds I want to explore in my imagination.
I've reclaimed the first hour of my day. Before emails, before news, before the world's noise, I sit with a cup of tea and my journal. Some days it stays blank. Others I scribble for a few moments and then jump to my laptop.
I've learned to recognize what creativity looks like in fallow periods. Sometimes it's not writing at all. It's repotting plants with my husband or cooking a complicated, new meal or listening deeply to a friend's story. These are all acts of observing life, of living.
For me, the myth of the creative lightning strike has been replaced by the truth of the quietly opened door. Creativity doesn't arrive dramatically. It slips in through the smallest openings we create for it.
What are your rituals in this season of your creative life? How have they changed from where you began?
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If you’re curious about the books I’ve written, you can learn more here! I’ve written a fantasy romance trilogy, a cozy rom-com with a touch of magic, and a college springtime romance.
Maya in Multicolor | The Boyfriend Wish | The Tiger at Midnight trilogy |