Missed a day (or a week) of writing? Here is how to restart

Why missing a day feels worse than it is

A 30-day challenge makes the streak visible, and a gap in the streak feels like failure. It is not. One missed day costs you one day of words, about 300 to 500 on this challenge. Spread across a book, that is nothing.

What actually costs you the book is what people do next. They feel behind, so they plan to write double the next day. The double day feels heavy, so they put it off. Now they are two days behind, and the plan becomes triple. Within a week, the draft feels like a debt instead of a project, and they stop opening it.

This is normal enough that it happens to people who go on to finish good books. Praveen Suthrum, author of Scope Forward, was writing every single day when different crises kept him from his book for almost seven weeks. His story on scribemedia.com describes coming back feeling completely disconnected from the material. With help from his Scribe team, he found his way back in, and the time away ended up helping him see the book the way a reader would. The book got written.

A miss is not the problem. The response to the miss is where books are won or lost.

Rule 1: never double up

Do not try to make up yesterday's words today. Write today's target, or less, and let yesterday go.

This feels wrong, especially to people who are good at their jobs, because at work you catch up on what you missed. A book is different. The goal of the challenge is a daily habit and a real start on the draft, not a specific word total on a specific date. A habit is built by showing up at a normal size on the next day, not by heroic make-up sessions.

If you happen to be in flow and write extra, keep it. Just do not plan for it, and do not count it as permission to skip tomorrow.

Rule 2: the restart rule

How you come back depends on how long you were away. Use this table:

Pick up where you left off, not where the calendar says

The 30 prompts are a sequence. If you did day 11, missed four days and come back, your next prompt is day 12. Do not skip ahead to "catch up" with the calendar. Each prompt builds on the one before it, and skipping five prompts leaves holes in the book.

That means your 30-day challenge may take 35 or 40 calendar days. That is fine. The challenge is 30 days of writing, not 30 days on a calendar.

The re-entry session

After a week or more away, the hardest part is not the writing. It is remembering what the book is and where you were. A re-entry session takes 20 to 30 minutes:

What you do not do in a re-entry session: reread the whole draft. After time away, rereading usually turns into judging, and judging turns into editing. You will reread everything on day 29 when you do the reverse outline. Until then, protect your forward motion.

Rule 3: shrink the task

Most missed days are not really about time. Look honestly at the days you missed. Often there were 30 minutes available, but the task felt too big to start. The fix is to make the task smaller until starting is easy.

Here is a sample of what that looks like, written by us as an example. The prompt for day 18 is to talk through your hardest chapter and write 500 words from it. If that has kept you away for three days, shrink it:

• Too big: "Write 500 words of chapter 5, the one about pricing."
• Smaller: "Write the first story in chapter 5."
• Smaller still: "Write three sentences about the client who pushed back on our prices in 2023."
• Smallest: "Open the document and write one sentence that starts with 'The problem with pricing is...'"

Go down the list until one makes you think "I can do that right now." Do it. Then decide whether to keep going. Usually you will.

The guide on setting a daily word count goal calls this your minimum viable day: a small, fixed number, often 100 words, that counts as a day when nothing else is possible.

When you miss a whole week

A week away is a different problem from a day away, because the book has gone cold. You may also feel embarrassed if you told people about the challenge. Here is what to do:

• Find the reason, in one sentence. "Travel for a client launch." "The kids were sick." "I got stuck on chapter 3 and avoided it." The first two are life. The third is a writing problem, and it needs a writing fix. See the guide on getting unstuck on a nonfiction draft.
• Check whether your time slot still works. If the reason you missed a week will repeat (a new early meeting, a new project), move your writing time before you restart.
• Do the re-entry session. Then two days at half target. Then your normal target.
• Tell one person you are back. If you announced the challenge, a short "I fell off and I am back on today" is enough. Nobody is keeping score as closely as you are.

Planned days off are not missed days

Some people write better with a rest day each week. That is a planning decision, not a failure. If you decide in advance that Sunday is off, then Sunday is off, and Monday is the next prompt. The challenge's lighter days (13, 14, 20, 21, 27 and 28) fall on the weekend if you start on a Monday, which is one reason we placed them there.

The difference between a planned day off and a missed day is when you decided. Decide on rest days at the start of the week, write them down, and they will not damage the habit.

Mistakes to avoid after a miss

• Restarting from day 1. It throws away real work and makes the book feel further away than it is.
• Raising your target to compensate. If anything, lower it for a few days.
• Using the break to "fix" what you wrote. Editing feels like progress, but it is not drafting. Keep going forward.
• Waiting for a clean start, such as next Monday or the first of the month. The best day to restart is today, with 100 words.