In the last two posts, I’ve talked about six of the reasons writers get stuck. These are the last couple I can currently think of:
- External factors. Sometimes, these are relatively minor things, like an addiction to a TV series or a deep desire to spend the day at the park, which take a bit of discipline and determination to resist if they disrupt one’s writing time too much. Other times, these are major disruptions, like moving, having a baby, or contracting a serious illness. Sometimes, the problem is more mental and emotional than obviously physical – being dumped by someone one expected to propose, or worrying about an elderly parent who is sliding into dementia.
For the minor disruptions, powering through is the usual fix, although sometimes it’s a signal that one needs a mental health break. Major external disruptions are another thing entirely. If they are clearly short-term, limited events (like moving), there’s nothing wrong with allowing oneself a writing break while one focuses in on the job at hand … as long as one is really clear about the point at which this “vacation” ends and one gets back to work. Long term life events, like a major illness in the family or a new baby or stressing out over something, are a different matter, and the most effective way of handling them depends on whether writing is more of an escape for the writer, or more of a passion that requires energy and focus.
For many writers, writing is both an escape and a passion, but they’re rarely balanced exactly equally under all circumstances. When major life changes create problems, writers for whom writing is an escape get more stressed when they don’t have time to write, even if what they write seems horrible. They need to squeeze in at least a little writing time every day, because writing helps with the stress. For other writers, producing too little or writing stuff that isn’t at peak quality because of the stress makes them even more stressed out, and creates a vicious circle. They need to give themselves permission to take some time off and/or write stuff that is terrible and disconnected.
Figuring out whether you need to squeeze in writing time or let it go requires being brutally honest with yourself about whether writing during a high-stress period is making you feel better, or making you feel worse.
- Burning out. Burnout happens when you’re pushing too hard. Sometimes, it’s too hard because of outside factors, as mentioned above – the writer is determined to get writing done in addition to whatever else is going on, and they simply overestimate the time and mental energy they have available. Having committed to writing three pages a day, they refuse to drop to one page a day (or take a complete break), even when it becomes more and more of a struggle. Eventually, their backbrain shuts down and won’t produce anything.
Other times, it’s the writer’s own choices that bring them to burnout. Some writers will drive themselves to burnout trying to keep up with a writer-friend (or enemy) who simply works at a much faster pace than they do. Others overcommit in an attempt to please editors, agents, friends, or fans, or take on too many projects in an attempt to increase their income. Still others have trouble juggling writing, editing, tracking submissions and income, publicizing their work, and having the rest of their life (whether or not that includes a day job). It is surprisingly easy to underestimate how much work goes into producing and selling a novel in addition to writing and revising the manuscript, and some writers routinely forget to allow for anything other than writing time. If they know that they can produce a solid draft in six months, they figure they can do two books a year … and then they either fall behind or exhaust themselves trying to write two drafts in a year because they didn’t allow any time for the necessary work that isn’t actually writing.
Burnout is sometimes preventable, if one is aware enough to spot it coming. The overcommitted writer can back off from making more commitments and negotiate extended deadlines to deal with the current overload, and start doubling or even tripling their official estimates of how long it will take to get any new project finished until they get a firm handle on what constitutes a reasonable workload for them.
When burnout is the result of external stress, it’s often more difficult to deal with, because external factors are usually completely outside the writer’s control. Sometimes, one can avoid sources of stress (several writers I know have completely stopped reading or listening to the news, for instance), but more often things just have to be dealt with (one can’t give back a new baby or decide not to have a chronic illness). For full-time writers, there’s also a limit on how much they can cut back on their writing time to deal with everything else – the bills still have to be paid, after all.
About all one can do in this situation is cut back a little bit on everything, and create time and space for enough self-care to keep one going until the crisis passes. If the stress is the sort of thing that obviously won’t pass for a really long time (see “new baby” and “chronic illness,” above), one has to adapt. It is hard to admit that one’s ability to produce has taken a nose dive and won’t recover for years, if ever, but forcing oneself to maintain a pre-crisis pace is a recipe for extended burnout that can last years.
Burnout, or even just a brush with burnout, requires recovery time. If the creative well has been drained, it needs time to refill; one can’t immediately resume full-scale normal production once the crisis is past. The trick here is to allow enough time for recuperation, but not so much that one gets into a permanent habit of not-writing. This is mostly a matter of self-awareness and an individual judgement call.
Thank you so much for this post!
I’m realizing that I have not truly looked at my workload and what is reasonable and feasible for me.
I do tend to compare myself to writers who are simply faster than I am, and I do rather ignore the revising, bookkeeping, and marketing that goes with each book when I am estimating the time I’ll need to put in.
I know I can write a solid, well-crafted doorstopper novel in 7 to 8 months. Novels of more usual size take me 3 to 4 months. Novellas (which I love) take 2 months.
With those time frames in mind, I’ve been disappointed in my output. I’ve felt that releasing 1 doorstopper novel in a year, or 1 novel and 1 novella in the same interval, really meant I was not working up to my potential.
You’ve helped me see not only that I was not assessing this reasonably, but also that I need to become more aware of the time (probably through officially tracking) it takes to do the other tasks that surround writing. In fact, I’ve been rather sloppy, I see, in structuring these other tasks. I do them, and give them considerable effort and care, but I haven’t given them (and myself in the doing of them) the respect they are due.
Thank you so much for clarifying my thinking! I will be a happier and healthier writer because of it.
With those time frames in mind, I’ve been disappointed in my output.
You’re kidding, right? It takes me four years to produce a moderate-sized novel. (The current WIP is on track to come in right at the four-year mark. There was one outlier that I knocked out in six months, but all the others… yep, four years, pretty consistently. And I’m not talking doorstops here, either.) I’ve tried to speed it up, but that’s worked about as well as when you try to speed up your commute and end up in a ditch.
I know, there’s always someone faster to compare yourself to, but seriously, your output speed makes me grind my teeth in envy. You’re doing fine!
Errrr. I wasn’t kidding. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said, “… there’s always someone faster to compare yourself to…”
It has just seemed to me that because I can write a doorstopper in (let’s be generous) 8 months, then I ought to be halfway through the next one 4 months after I finish. And I’m not. I never am.
For one thing, I seem to be subject to some mental exhaustion at the close of writing a doorstopper and need a month to recover. For the rest…well, the revising usually takes a month, other publishing tasks take a good 3 weeks, plus there are all the blog posts and marketing tasks. And it all adds up, as Pat has made me see more clearly than heretofore. 😉
I seem to be subject to some mental exhaustion at the close of writing a doorstopper
I should think so!
I always plan a few months of working on short stories after I finish a novel; the end stretch usually Eats My Brain, and I need a while to get out of that all-consuming headspace before I dive into the next one. I don’t always follow my plan; the current WIP jumped up and down and demanded I start it almost immediately (and I probably would have been better off if I’d made it wait its turn). But the theory is sound.
And yes, all those other not-writing-but-related tasks take time, you’re quite right. And there are, annoyingly, only so many hours in a day….
That sounds like a version of “I wrote 10,000 words today! If I do that every day, I can finish a novel every two weeks!” Which is seriously implausible.
“Mental exhaustion at the close of writing a doorstopper” sounds like a regular part of your process that you haven’t been acknowledging. As I pointed out elsewhere in this series of posts, every writer’s process contains downtime. For daily writers, it’s the time between finishing today’s work and when they start tomorrows; for burst writers, it can be anywhere from a week to months (one of my writer friends routinely produces a fat novel in three months…and averages a novel a year, because that’s how much recharging he needs to write that much that fast).
Personally I find it wise to do some work on another piece, on the same day, when I finish one.
Then, I tend to work in parallel.
LOL! I wouldn’t have thought myself to be a burst writer, but maybe I am, just sort of a long and sustained burst (5 days per week for as long as it takes to get the project done: 2 months for novellas, 7 months for doorstoppers). I will have to think about this.
One of the hardest things for a writer to recognize – and build into their schedule – is that the book isn’t finished when the manuscript is done. Even when we know better. I really like your comment about doing the rest of the work, but not respecting it; that really hit the nail on the head.
Still others have trouble juggling writing, editing, tracking submissions and income, publicizing their work, and having the rest of their life
That would be me, right there. Okay, I don’t have much of the income or publicizing to deal with right now, but writing-time and submitting-time is a constant seesaw, and ghu knows the rest-of-life stuff would happily swallow every minute without a burp. I’ve dealt with it thus far by serially ignoring all but one or two things, which works great for those chosen things, but eventually means everything else is getting dealt with on a crisis basis. Not great for the stress levels, that.
Time management is a problem for everyone I know, whether they’re writers or not. There always seem to be more responsibilities, more things I want to do (even if I don’t have to), and all the time the old, pre-existing responsibilities get more complicated and take more time than ever.
At some point, you have to sit down and triage. “You can do anything…but you can’t do everything.” Which means you have to pick and choose which bits of “everything” will be the “anythings” you can actually fit into your life.
I am a terrible role model in this regard; I find it next to impossible to say “no” to things I actually want to do, but realistically don’t have time for. But that’s what has to happen, or stuff that’s important but that doesn’t have a deadline will get shoved aside in favor of all the “once in a lifetime opportunities” that are going to expire at the end of the week.
Too true re: time management.
In a way, I’m lucky in that I don’t have a lot of family responsibilities or other “outside” demands on my time. On the other hand, a DIY habit was perhaps not the best thing to develop if I was going to be a writer. (Just because that half-demo’d bathroom has been an issue for quite a while now doesn’t mean it’s not an Issue.) And I’m actively trying to cultivate more want-to-dos; my current level of those is insufficient for recharging purposes, even if I don’t know where I’d wedge more into the schedule.
Must invent human cloning. As soon as I find the time….
I’ve never seen this concept articulated by anyone else, but it sure caught my attention. Wow! This explains so much. I’m now realizing that even though I become unhappy when too long an interval of not-writing elapses, writing is not really an escape for me. In fact, the reverse, because I’m usually drawing from some of my most shadowed experiences and feelings for at least some of the story I’m telling. Writing is my passion. Which yields a different dynamic than if it were my escape. I’d not seen that so clearly before.
(This post had a lot directly pertinent to me! Thus, the multiple comments. My apologies!)