After I gave birth to my daughter, I didn’t feel like I’d write anything ever again. As a writer, this was particularly scary! It wasn’t that I was too tired to write (though I was certainly very tired), or that having a baby made me prioritize the baby over writing projects (though babies can be all-consuming, especially in those first few weeks); instead, I felt something like a cool fog of indifference about writing that I’d never experienced before. It felt as though in giving birth to my daughter, I lost a part of my creative brain. It was truly odd!

I wanted to get writing again, but I found it was simply really, really hard to do so.  I would make time for myself the way books suggested, and I would journal, and I would blog, and I would do all those writing exercises that are supposed to help stimulate the writing brain, but nothing helped; I was stuck in a rut, and it felt as though I was never going to climb out. 

I wish I could tell you that there was a magic bullet to all of it; that one day I found exactly the thing I needed in order to start writing again. But what I found instead was that I had changed as a person. Becoming a mother made me fundamentally change as a writer, too. It used to be that I would write whenever the muse hit; if I was working on school work, I would simply take a break and write. I’d write at night after work, staying up late nine times out of ten. But with a baby, this no longer worked for me. I couldn’t write whenever an idea came to my mind. After work was a slog of child pickup and then feeding the baby and putting the baby to bed and soothing the baby and by the time I could sit down to write, I couldn’t form a coherent thought in my brain, and I certainly couldn’t write one.

So I started scheduling my writing time first. For a while, I would make a habit of taking my laptop to the local park during my lunch break and sitting in a picnic shelter to eat my lunch and try to get in 500 words. Sometimes this shifted to early in the morning before anyone else woke up, but I found that if I got those words in before I got home at the end of the day, I was far more likely to get anything written than if I waited until I was too tired from the day to think straight. And slowly but surely, day after day of getting in those 500 words whether I was feeling at all creative or not, I slowly began to claw my way back from the abyss.

It took time, more than anything else. Time to heal my body from giving birth. Time to give my mind the sleep it needed. Time that I carved out for myself to do the task I used to have to bandwidth to do late into the night (aka, any time past 8PM). But slowly, I got my creativity going again, and soon, the 500 words a day, then 750, then 1000. And soon, dear reader, I had a whole novel written. Soon, I was writing for other publications, too. 

But if you’d have told me that I’d write a novel back when my daughter was first born, I would have laughed; I didn’t have the reason to buckle down and put myself on a writing schedule before she was born, so the tough work of novel writing didn’t happen. Once she was born, and the writing time became a thing I had to work hard to achieve, my writing got better as a result. Time became a precious commodity that I valued more, and as a result, I wanted to do the very best work I could with the small amount of time that I had. 

So friend, that’s my advice: if you just had a baby, don’t fear! Your creativity WILL come back, if you can find a way to enable it in this new phase of life. In fact, your work may be even better than before! But life is a series of phases, and if we try to work in one phase exactly the same way we worked in another, it doesn’t always work, because our lives have changed. By changing my writing method postpartum, I was able to claw back the creativity I was scared was lost forever. It wasn’t. I just had to find it again.