Once upon a time, there was a writer who could write anywhere. Even in the quiet corners of the cafés, under soft yellow lamps, or on the back pages of her notebooks. Words followed her like her loyal friends. She never had to actually chase them; they simply arrived. They were gentle, bright and alive.
But one day, they stopped coming. She opened her notebook, stared at the page, and waited for that familiar spark. But nothing came. The words she once trusted had gone quiet, like birds leaving before the rain. She told herself it was just a bad day. Then a bad week. Then a dry season. But slowly, she began to wonder if she had forgotten how to write.
When the Words Go Quiet
Forgetting how to write doesn’t happen suddenly. It happens slowly, secretly, just like the dust settling on an old piano. At first, she blamed time. “I’m just too busy,” she said. Then she blamed herself, “Maybe I’m not talented enough anymore.” She started reading what others wrote and compared her silence to their sentences. Every new paragraph she read became a reminder of what she couldn’t do. Her notebooks stayed closed. Her mind, once filled with stories, became filled with self-doubt.
But forgetting how to write isn’t about losing words. It’s about losing a connection. Connection with yourself, your heart, and the reason you started writing in the first place.
The Pressure to Sound Perfect
The writer used to write freely. She didn’t care about her grammar, her form, or if people would like it. But now, every sentence she tried to form had to pass through her fear. “Will this make sense?” “Will anyone care?” “Will it sound good enough?”
The more she cared about being perfect, the less she could write. She started editing before she even began. She wrote to impress instead of express. Her thoughts became heavy with judgment, and creativity cannot live where fear grows.
That’s how writers forget. Not because they stop knowing how to form words, but because they forget how to feel them.
The Fear of Starting Again
She began to fear the blank page. It looked like a question she didn’t know how to answer. What if she started and failed again? What if the magic was gone forever? What if she had already written the best parts of herself? These thoughts made her stay away from writing altogether. But deep inside, the desire still burned inside her. It was small, soft and stubborn.
She missed the feeling of losing herself in a sentence. She missed being surprised by her own thoughts. She missed the quiet joy of finding meaning in chaos.
The truth was simple. She hadn’t lost writing. She had just lost trust.
When Life Replaces Writing
Sometimes, writers stop writing because they are too busy living. Life fills their notebook. With heartbreaks, slow mornings, unanswered prayers, the sound of rain and the way someone’s voice changes when they say goodbye. These experiences don’t fit neatly into words right away. They need time to settle.
Maybe the writer hadn’t forgotten how to write. Maybe life was teaching her what to write about next.
She realised that silence wasn’t empty; it was a pause. The kind that lets emotions breathe before turning into sentences.
The Myth of Constant Creativity
In a world that demands productivity, artists are expected to always produce. Writers feel guilty for not writing, as if silence means failure.
But creativity doesn’t work like a machine; it moves like a season. There are times for bloom, and there are times for rest. A garden doesn’t bloom every day, yet it’s still alive beneath the soil. The same is true for writers.
When you forget how to write, it’s not the end of your art; it’s your art learning how to grow again, quietly and unseen.
The Moment She Returned
One night, the writer picked up her pen again, not because she had something perfect to say, but because she missed the feeling of trying.
Her first sentence was awkward. Her second felt forced. But then, something gentle happened to her. She stopped caring about how it sounded. She just wrote it. She wrote about her silence, about the fear of losing her voice, about how words once ran away from her. And in doing so, she found them again.
They were never truly gone. They were just waiting for her to stop chasing and start listening.
Writing Without Expectation
This time, she didn’t write to be read. She wrote to remember. To remember that writing is not a test. It’s actually a way to breathe. To remember that not every sentence needs to be beautiful to be true. To remember that words don’t belong to perfection, they belong to feeling.
She realised the most honest writing often comes when we stop trying to sound “writerly.” It comes when we write the way we think, when we allow our rawness to stay visible.
What Forgetting Really Means
Forgetting how to write is not losing your art. It’s being rewritten by life. The writer’s silence had meaning. It was teaching her patience, humility, and the beauty of not knowing. It was reminding her that her worth wasn’t measured by productivity. When she finally understood that, she could see the poetry in her pause. Even her not-writing had been part of her story.
Conclusion
In a book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Anne Lamott also talks about how every writer faces fear, self-doubt, and moments when words simply disappear. She shares that writing doesn’t have to be perfect or come all at once. It just has to begin, even in small steps.
The title of her book comes from something her father once said to her brother when he was struggling with a school report on birds. He told him, “Just take it bird by bird.” That simple line became a symbol for writers everywhere. Like a reminder to take things slowly, one sentence at a time, one honest moment at a time.
Lamott’s words reflect the same truth: even when a writer forgets how to write, the only way back is through patience, honesty, and small beginnings.
The writer who forgot how to write never truly forgot. She just needed time to remember differently. She writes now, slower, softer, with more honesty and less fear. She doesn’t rush her thoughts or fight her silence. She lets both coexist, knowing that every pause has its own rhythm. She learned that words are like birds. They fly away sometimes, but they always come back when you stop chasing them.
And maybe that’s what writing really is. It's not about always having something to say, but about having the courage to start again, even when you don’t. Because sometimes, forgetting how to write isn’t a loss, it’s a beginning disguised as silence.
Every writer, at some point, forgets how to write. But maybe that’s necessary. Because only when we forget do we truly learn to begin again, not as writers chasing words, but as humans learning how to listen to them.
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