It’s that time again. Time for Hillary to make a really long, convoluted metaphor.

Remember Simon, the Simon Says type memory game with the light up colors from Milton Bradley? Here’s a visual aide from our dear friend eBay in the event you don’t live in the 80s like I do:

The game worked like this:

• Machine flashes: RED
• You press: RED
• Machine flashes: RED BLUE
• You press: RED BLUE
• Machine flashes: RED BLUE RED
• You press: RED BLUE RED
• and so on…

Of course, it got harder and harder the longer you played as the string of colors increased so you had to remember a longer sequence.

Writing a book is a lot like playing this game. You have to keep every moment of your story in your head even as you keep adding to the pattern with new colors. Forgot your story arcs, your theme or that detail you put in three chapters ago and you’ll only end up having to rewrite everything that follows. As long as you keep going in a row, you’ve got the pattern held pretty firm in your head. But what happens when you get distracted or have to stop?

Imagine pausing a game of Simon and then trying to come back to it a few minutes later. You might still remember the last pattern, especially if you wrote yourself some notes, but it’s going to be much harder than it was before. In fact, the more time you take off from it, the harder its going to be to get back into the groove. You were doing a great job of holding the complicated pattern in your head while you were working on it non-stop but as soon as you were distracted or stopped, you made it that much harder to get going again.

You’ll notice I said it makes it “harder” not “impossible.”

Working on a book, whether its a first draft or editing, fiction or non, is a lot like this. You’re going to have to walk away from it, no one can write and edit an entire book in one sitting, but the longer you step away, the harder it is to get things moving again. You may have to waste time re-reading what you already wrote to remind yourself of the pattern before you can back into it.

This is why its imperative that you make yourself work on your work in progress on a regular schedule and don’t allow yourself to take long breaks from it. The longer the break, the harder it is to keep the whole project (or pattern) in your head at once. This is a lesson you only learn by actually tackling a book length work but its a vital one: every time you take a long break from your WIP, you run the risk of totally losing the pattern and it either being very difficult if not impossible to get started again.

Writing is hard enough without making it harder on yourself.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be playing Simon online.

Have you ever taken too long a break from your novel and had trouble getting back into it? How did you eventually overcome it? Did you overcome it? Please share your experiences with it below.