Sometimes the voice telling you it’s not working is just the sound of your writing practice coming back to life.
“I got stuck with them on site with the van,” my client told me during our session. She’d been writing her crime novel consistently, making progress, but now she was second-guessing everything. “I realized what I was doing was writing stuff for them to do that had absolutely nothing to do with the story, so I took that all out.”
Meanwhile, another client was wrestling with different but similar doubts as she approached the end of her YA novel: “I have to decide what is happening with Camile when Gwen’s not there… I can’t have it be that time just stops in Camile’s narrative when she’s gone. I want things to feel real because otherwise it’s complete fantasy.”
Both writers were experiencing something I see often: the uncertainty tax that comes with re-engaging your writing practice, especially after a break OR when you’re first starting your practice or starting out on a new project.
The Uncertainty Tax
I call it the uncertainty tax because it feels like a penalty for showing up to write. The voice in your head that says the scene you just wrote is pointless. The nagging sense that you’re going in the wrong direction. The impulse to delete everything and start over because surely this isn’t good enough.
This tax is steepest in two situations: when you’re getting back into a writing routine after time away, and when you’re establishing a new practice. Your writing muscles are out of shape, your confidence is shaky, and every creative choice feels fraught.
But here’s what I’ve learned from coaching dozens of writers through this phase: the uncertainty almost never means what you think it means.
When Getting Back on Track Feels Like Getting Lost
My client who was stuck at the crime scene had just completed a major revision project to prepare work for her writing workshop. She’d spent an entire week going through early chapters, making connections, discovering plot threads she’d forgotten about—including a white van that would become crucial to her story—and before that she’d been entertaining a new, glorious grandchild for two weeks.
“It was funny. The latest chapter came out of that re-reading because I realized that in chapter four or something, I’d actually talked about Carla taking a picture of a dingy white van, which I had completely forgotten about. And then there it was, I’d written it again in a new chapter. That same white van was back!”
We were both really excited about this revelation—and the meaning it brought to the story’s web. Clues were starting to connect!
This kind of rediscovery should feel triumphant. And it did, briefly. But then came the uncertainty tax: suddenly every scene felt wrong, every choice questionable. She found herself writing “stuff for them to do that had absolutely nothing to do with the story.”
The problem wasn’t her writing. The problem was that she was energetically in between two phases: the analytical revision mindset and the forward-momentum drafting mindset. She was asking revision questions (“Does this serve the story?”) while trying to do drafting work (“What happens next?”).
The False Signal of Self-Doubt
When writers tell me they’re worried their current scene is filler, or that they don’t know where they’re going, or that they should probably delete everything and start over, I’ve learned to ask: “How long have you been showing up consistently? What’s your practice been like lately?”
If the answer is less than two or three weeks—if they’re writing regularly, meeting their word count goals, staying engaged with their project, but haven’t been for long enough—then the uncertainty is almost always a false signal.
My client at the crime scene was actually doing everything right. She’d written through a scene to see what would happen. She’d recognized that some of it wasn’t serving the story. She’d made notes about what to cut later. This is exactly how drafting is supposed to work.
But because she was out of practice with the uncertainty that comes with exploratory writing, she interpreted normal drafting discomfort as evidence that she was failing.
The Canopy Problem
My YA writer was facing a different version of the same issue. After a summer of family events, work crises, and life upheaval, she was finally getting back to consistent daily writing. But instead of feeling relief, she was spiraling into big-picture anxiety.
“I don’t want the parents or the grandmother to come off as irresponsible, that they’re just going to let this girl disappear and not get worried,” she told me, suddenly convinced she needed to add a hospital subplot to make the adults seem more responsible.
“This is canopy,” I told her. “You’re ‘canopying.’” It was a new phrase, a verb I’d just made up. But it fit.
She was trying to solve structural problems while she was still rebuilding her daily writing practice. Instead of staying focused on “roots and trunks”—the scene-by-scene work of moving the story forward—she was climbing up to survey the whole forest and panicking about the view.
The uncertainty tax had convinced her that urgent structural changes were needed, when what she actually needed was patience with the process of re-engaging.
The Muscle Memory of Confidence
I told her: “The stuff that you’re doing here with the hospital—you’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”
She’d been away from her project for months. Of course it felt unfamiliar. Of course the big-picture questions seemed urgent. But she’d only been back to consistent writing for about two weeks—not nearly long enough to rebuild the muscle memory of confidence.
“You started writing back around the 12th,” I pointed out. “You’ve been writing somewhat consistently since then. That’s around two weeks. It makes sense that you’re at a point where the consistency is starting to happen, and you’re having self-doubt. It happens. But that doesn’t mean anything is wrong.”
Before you’ve done enough consistent days of writing, you haven’t built up the internal evidence that you can trust your creative instincts. You’re “sort of out there, and you’re looking down to see like, is there a ground under me?”
But there was as much ground under her as she’d created, and it was firm.
Sometimes questions come up that don’t need to be answered until revision—when you’ll know a lot more about everything than you do in the middle of a draft.
The Daily Practice Solution
Both clients shared something crucial: they were getting back to consistent daily writing after disruptions. One had taken time off to prepare for workshop and enjoy a new grandchild. The other had survived what she called “the summer of death.”
In both cases, the uncertainty wasn’t about their stories—it was about being out of practice with the daily rhythm that builds writing confidence and joy.
“The goal now is getting back to your writing mode,” I told my crime novelist. “Don’t worry about the workshop feedback. See what comes in and probably park it for revision once you finish your first draft.”
To my fantasy client, I was more direct: “Everything you’re saying today, just take it with a grain of salt. You went away for a while, now you’re back.”
The solution isn’t to solve all the plot problems or write perfect scenes. The solution is to rebuild the daily practice that makes you trust your own creative process.
Trust the Process (Even When It Feels Messy)
When writers are in the grip of uncertainty, they often want to make big changes: rewrite the beginning, delete the last chapter, add a subplot. These dramatic gestures feel like taking control.
But most of the time, what you actually need is patience. The scene that feels like filler might reveal its purpose later or maybe it’s just there to get you to what comes next. That’s OK. The plot thread that seems to go nowhere might connect to something you haven’t written yet. The parental responsibility issue might resolve naturally through the story’s own internal logic.
In both cases, the uncertainty was temporary. The daily practice was what mattered.
The Long View
Writers who stick with consistent daily practice report something interesting: after a few weeks, the uncertainty starts to feel different. It becomes less like a judgment (“This is bad writing”) and more like curiosity (“I wonder where this is going”).
That shift happens not because the writing gets easier, but because the tolerance for not-knowing increases. You start to trust that showing up daily will do what it needs to—produce more words that eventually reveal the story.
After a while, the question you face each day starts to shift: it goes from “did I write well today?” to “did I write and meet my word-count goals?”
You go from judging your work as good or bad to a simple binary question—did I write today?
That’s when things get easier. And much more fun.
How do you handle uncertainty in your own writing? Have you noticed patterns in when self-doubt hits hardest? Feel free to leave a comment, engage here with the other readers and me. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
