5 Ways to Maintain Your Writing Practice During Massive Change
At the end of March of 2026, I left the US and permanently moved to France at the age of 50. I had two months from the time of receiving my visa to deal with a lifetime’s worth of possessions and move my entire existence, my business, and my family to a new country.
It was, as they say, a lot.
Like you, I have a writing practice. I also practice meditation, journaling, music, running, and have a host of other hobbies and habits that are important to my mental and emotional well-being.
During the most intense and disruptive season of change I’ve ever experienced, I put into place several things that kept my practices from disintegrating and my habits on life support. And none of them involved pushing through or “just doing it.”
If you’re facing a massive life change of your own, these five things might also help you keep your writing practice going, your goals alive—and your sanity intact.
Do the absolute bare minimum
A major life change—especially one that drastically shakes or remakes your daily life, like moving countries or a having a baby—will snag exponentially more time and brain processing power than you anticipate. Day-to-day survival and dealing with what’s on the plate immediately in front of you will more than likely swallow up every ounce of extra energy, and regular habits will quickly become irregular. And then it’s all too easy to let a gap in consistency put a halt to the entire practice. For me, because I have ADHD, a lack of consistency risks becoming total abandonment of a goal or practice, and fast, and it’s nearly impossible for me to pick it back up again once it’s been dropped.
Once I had my French visa in hand, I had a short two months to get rid of nearly everything I owned, figure out how to store or ship the rest, and get myself, my partner, and my cats to a foreign country at the same time I was running a business with an already packed schedule while onboarding a major new client. Oh, and keeping myself fed, clean, and somewhat rested. I also had practices important to my well-being to keep up with: exercise, journaling, meditation, learning French, working on my own stories.
But because of the intensity of the transition, everything in my life that wasn’t running my business or getting me to France was at risk of being abandoned. Except, those practices were too important to give up on. I knew I’d need those things in my life to deal with the aftermath of the move: culture shock, bureaucracy, temporary living conditions while looking for a permanent home, and my feelings about all the above.
So I made it okay to just do the bare minimum.
Fifteen minutes of daily morning meditation became one minute of stillness.
Daily journaling turned into a brief check-in about my feelings on Sunday mornings.
An hour-long walk became a lap around the block.
I still set goals, but I made them minuscule. Super, super easy. Since my executive functioning was completely gobbled by paperwork, travel arrangements, and downsizing fifty years of stuff into a tiny crate, I knew everything else demanding a bit of my brain power would have to become much less energy intensive. Barely enough to maintain, and nothing else.
Once I was on the other side of the move and things had settled down a bit, I gradually increased my efforts until I was back to where I was before, my practices saved, my goals intact.
Takeaway: When you’re going through a massive life change, don’t try to stick to your normal goals. Set tiny ones that you can manage without too much executive functioning or planning. Ten minutes of writing after the alarm goes off. A hundred words right before bed. Just something to keep your writing practice on life support.
Automate your practice
Have you ever heard the term decision fatigue? It’s the tiredness you feel after your brain has been forced to make a million decisions, large and small, over a stretch of time. It’s made exponentially worse when those decisions are laden with a lot of heavy emotions.
During the course of downsizing a lifetime of possessions and memories before my move, when every choice of what to keep versus what to discard or give away came with a wave of grief, nostalgia, or forced cold evaluation, this kind of fatigue kept me from having the spoons to figure out what to eat for dinner every night (Door Dash was my best friend) much less look for my journal, find a pen, and decide what to write about every day, or on Sunday mornings when my practice went to weekly.
Eventually, I also no longer had a desk, or even a place to store my journal.
I realized the only way I’d beat that fatigue was to automate the process. I made a list of a handful of topics that I cycled through in my short journaling sessions so I didn’t have to decide what to write about, then kept the journal itself and my pen under my pillow so I didn’t have to make the choice to get up, find the journal, and start writing. Every Sunday morning, before coffee, I’d open my eyes, open the bookmarked blank page, pick the next topic on my list, do my five minutes of journaling, and then stash it all back under my pillow until the next week.
Because it was easy and I didn’t have to devote brain power to the process, it became much more likely that I’d maintain my practice in the midst of the upheaval.
Takeaway: Make your writing practice even easier than it already is. Automate the process by creating a simple, logical routine to it, such as: alarm goes off, open laptop that sits on the bedside table, write words. Keep your tools (notebook, pens, computer) in the same spot, within easy reach. Give yourself only one or two options for the what you write (easy scenes, favorite POVs) so you don’t have to make too many decisions before you begin.
Allow your practice to take a different form
I’m a big fan of meditation and have kept up a streak of daily practice that has been unbroken since 2020—six years of at least fifteen minutes every morning.
During my move to France, and even after I arrived, it was a real struggle to find fifteen minutes of time each morning after waking at dawn to tackle essentially another full-time job (the move) before my full-time job, or to still my ADHD brain well enough for that amount of time when I did have it to gain any benefit.
But dang it! I had that streak to maintain, not to mention a deep desire to not abandon a practice that had saved my mental health all through the pandemic and beginning a new career and starting a business, and a whole host of other significant life events in the last six years.
So I allowed my fifteen minutes with the meditation app to take a different form: one minute, no app, just myself and some noise-canceling headphones. Sixty seconds of stillness every day, which was both manageable and surprisingly effective. It kept my commitment, retained that “muscle memory” of my practice, and accommodated my schedule and the demands on my time.
Thankfully, now that I’ve more or less settled in my new country, I’m back to my regular daily practice in the way I was accustomed to it before.
Takeaway: As a writer, you write, whatever form that takes. In the middle of massive upheaval, as long as you’re putting words down, do they have to be fully formed scenes/chapters/a book? Maybe you work on character sketches for a time, or try microfiction. Write two-line poems every morning, or a list of changes you want to make to a draft when you return to a full writing schedule. Allow your writing to take whatever new form your energy allows.
Give yourself grace if you fall short
A lot of the advice floating around about keeping a writing practice alive when your life blows up takes the shape of “just do it.” Push through. Find the time. No excuses.
I’m not the biggest fan of that advice in its literal form—sometimes pushing through does more harm than good. There will be some days during a massive change when even the bare minimum is absolutely not possible.
And that is one hundred percent okay.
The voice in your head will tell you it’s not. It will tell you that you’re failing, that you’re at risk of ruining everything if you don’t meet even the bare minimum. Ignore it.
Sometimes during a massive change, your exhausted body will need more rest instead of ten minutes of writing, or your tapped-out brain will demand an hour of mindless television rather than an hour plotting your next scene. Honor that and give your wellness what it needs. Pushing through opens the door to burnout, and burnout is the quickest route to never wanting to open your WIP again.
Takeaway: Listen to your energy levels, mental, emotional, or physical, and give yourself grace if the bare minimum on any given day is too much. No permission required.
Don’t force a premature return to former productivity
I’ve been in France for three and a half months, and I’m just now feeling my energy levels return to the point they were at last fall, before applying for my visa, packing, and moving hit me like a freight train.
The productive little squirrel in my brain has been chittering at me since my plane touched down in late March to “get back to it already!” It’s been a real effort to put it on mute and resist the temptation to dive right back in to my practices at the same level I maintained before the move.
But I’m glad I did.
On the other side of every massive change is a period of adjustment to a new way of being: a new country, new customs, a new daily rhythm, new schedule, demands, decisions to be made. You, yourself, might be a whole new person, or you might have a whole new person to take care of, and as a result, your brain is still building the neural pathways necessary to integrate that newness and turn the novelty into familiarity.
While the acute demands on your time and energy have probably diminished, a part of your internal operating system is still running cleanup tasks in the background.
So don’t force yourself into the same rhythms of your past life right away. Give your brain and spirit time to do its thing, then gradually add more activity or duration to your practices, pausing each time you do to make sure you’re feeling okay. If you find yourself exhausted or scattered after a longer writing session or feeling overwhelmed at any point, retreat. Rest. Try again later.
Takeaway: It may be a while before you feel ready to resume your former writing goals or the same intensity of your previous writing practice. Let that be okay. Pretty soon, you’ll find yourself daydreaming again about your WIP, and that’s a good sign that you’re ready to pick up where you left off before the massive life change.
