I managed to convince myself to take a week off from posting to the website, as a means of avoiding burnout. It wasn’t easy, but it was necessary. As much as I want to post every week, every day, even, to keep up consistent site traffic, I recognized that my energy is not unlimited. I still feel as though I am burning out, though more slowly. (Further interventions will be needed.) This issue of how to take breaks brings up my two favorite kinds of writer’s block: the kind you get from burning out by not taking breaks, and the kind you get from taking a break and then having trouble getting back into your work.
The thing is that it’s difficult to start up writing after a hiatus of any length. Even taking a day off (which is a much-needed respite for any writer, except perhaps the pathologically prolific, such as Brandon Sanderson) makes the next day back difficult. But again. It’s necessary.
A lot of my writing about habits and how to maintain them has been general, because I cannot tell you what to do. There are rules or rather guidelines that apply to almost everyone, but the specifics of how to apply them to your life cannot be imposed from without.
The rules and guidelines we’ve talked about are these:
-Write, edit, share with friends. Writing doesn’t have to be lonely.
-Find what works for you. Most people need order to thrive, but not all; and order might look different for different people. So find the habits that work for you. And try to stick to them. Friends can help you develop habits and stick to them.
-Be lenient with yourself. You will miss days. You will be unable to write as much as you want on a given day. Even if you have a very good day, you may find yourself wishing you could write more. In the words of one of the great sages of our time: That’s pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts. It never helps.
But again, how to live your life by them is a different matter. But what I can do is tell you how I apply them to my situation. And of course I can invite you to contact us and ask questions as specific or general as you see fit to ask.
So.
Storytime: My Experiences with Burnout
I have recently (as of perhaps December 2021) come within a hair’s breadth of finishing a manuscript that was begun around 2016. I still don’t fully know what causes my brain to click at the start of an idea, but some five years ago that’s what happened. I’d previously written a fifty page short story. But suddenly there I was writing a fiftieth page, and then a sixtieth, with no end in sight. It was exhilarating. Sometimes I would go to the library, and, instead of beginning with my dissertation, I would start by moving the cursor a bit further forward on this science fiction manuscript. But as the page-count ticked upward, a few at a time, it seemed the dissertation was not crawling up at the same rate, or at all, for that matter.
So around 2017 or 2018 (I don’t recall exactly when) I decided to shelve the fiction in favor of finishing my dissertation. I still thought a career in academia waited for me on the other side. I still thought that the dissertation would be my meal-ticket. And the fictional work was a fun side-project that might pay eventually, but more importantly would give me a creative outlet alongside my academic writings. I suppose I thought I would be that rare creature, the writer-professor like Mark Strand or Saskia Hamilton, both of whom had been my teachers at Columbia.
I was deeply depressed in my last year of dissertation-writing. Now, depression is a real illness and I will not devalue it by imagining that I could have changed just a single thing, and so gotten rid of it. But I will say that dropping something I loved in order to spend more time doing something I usually loathed was not helpful to my mental health. Realizing I was doing so should have been an indication that I was on the wrong path. But it wasn’t. I was blinded by the Emerald City of academic achievement. Small wonder my mental health only began to improve after I left the university, and more so after I decided to turn my back on scholarly pursuit, full stop.
I knew at the time I was not happy finishing my dissertation. I think I suspected that I would need those credentials; that i had gone so far so I might as well go a bit farther. You know the way people convince themselves of things. Stopping the fiction made it so much more difficult to get back into it. I would think for days at a time: I really should keep writing that piece. Never mind whether it was good. I liked writing it. And… nothing. What made the difference for me was a writing community. We met every day and I would write. Having these people around me (ok on Zoom) who, I knew, were also doubting themselves made it easier to say “no” to that voice inside my head.
The logic for defeating writer’s block turned out to be a simple Euclidean proof. I was doubting myself. The people I was writing with were doubting themselves. I was not doubting them because I had read their writing and I knew it to be good. I trusted their skill at writing; their judgment in matters concerning writing. They were not doubting me. Therefore I should not doubt myself. I did not remain with that writing group long. Just because something is the solution to one problem does not mean it is the solution to another.
What I Learned from my Brush with Burnout
So it turns out I was wrong about nearly everything. I needed my creative writing, no less then than I need it now. Needed it much more than I needed to finish my dissertation. I don’t know if the decision to grit my teeth and finish my dissertation was a good one. I’m not sure I’ll ever know. But in any case, making those mistakes is not something I’d go back and undo if I could. I would liken the situation to the time-travel tropes in science fiction and fantasy. The problem with time-travel loops is: if you change the thing in the past, then you remove the impetus to go back and change it, and so you create a paradox. I could wish I had not made the decision I made. But in that case I would not have the wisdom to wish I’d made a different decision.
If I hadn’t had this wrenchingly painful object lesson in how important my writing is to me, I might never have begun devoting myself to it as an avocation, a side-gig, and a way to connect with friends both old and new. My life today would be unimaginably different, and mostly for the worse.
I’m not sold on the idea of getting old and dying; but I am having fun getting wiser. And since I can’t do anything about the former, I just have to suck it up as something that’s irresistibly tied to the latter.
The Productivity Paradox
The thing I keep coming back to is: if I view my writing as something I should be doing then taking time off is just laziness and returning to it after a hiatus is not a big deal. I should have been writing all along. So I need to just pick up where I left off and make up for lost time. But that’s not how it works, is it? If that were true, then every morning I would be berating myself for the time I spent asleep. Multiple times a day, I would need to berate myself for performing life-sustaining functions. My job would be a distraction, never mind that I need money (and health insurance) to live.
Such self-abnegation sounds funny when you put it in terms so stark. But greater versions of the same ludicrous behavior happen every day. Some eight years ago, a Stony Brook professor I love and respect said to a crowd of grad students: “The trick to passing [your comprehensive exams] is to shorten your sleep from six hours a night to five.” I think he meant it as a joke. But it’s a toxic joke. And the possibility that it’s a joke doesn’t stop it from being toxic. The canard that you have to sacrifice your body on the altar of productivity is pretty deeply ingrained, especially in American culture.
Avoiding Burnout: A Way Forward
The only way we start to oppose such toxicity is by banding together. Yes, I’m pro-union. But in this case I mean writing groups. You might have a little voice in the back of your head that says: “I’m no good if I’m not productive,” but you probably wouldn’t stand for that kind of filth coming out of your friend’s mouth. If they were berating themselves like that you would beg them to stop; beg them to see that their worth doesn’t come from their ability to move the cursor just a bit further. And if they treated you like that—saw your productivity without seeing your humanity—I hope you would have the wisdom to drop them as a friend. (You’d confront them first and see if the situation improved. But if it didn’t, well…)
The point is that positivity is self-reinforcing, and so is toxicity. These cycles can be difficult to break. But any intervention you make can have ripple effects. Making friends with someone you meet online who encourages you to seek balance at the expense of blind productivity. Putting breaks in your calendar. And holding to those breaks. Scheduling time with friends to write together, to discuss writing together, but also to discuss other things. Reading books for fun, not just self-help books and research. All of these steps will give you more energy. And that increased energy will give you the space to make even more good decisions.
You do have to keep it up. It is easier to slide back into old bad habits than it is to maintain new, good ones. But after a while, those new habits aren’t so difficult to maintain, either. And if they are? Well, that’s what friends are for. Or maybe they’re the wrong habits and you need to keep looking.
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