If there’s “no good reason” why you should feel burned out, yet you feel burned out, consider a rest. After that, your feelings might go, “Wait, it doesn’t seem hard anymore. …Huh.”
It sounds fake when I put it that way, but it’s been true for me.
If I reason through the artistic blocks I’m feeling, or write out my frustrations, and take some time away from the project, I tend to come back recharged.
Yeah, I know, the essence of what I’m saying is “taking breaks is good.” Fifty thousand million jillion people have said this already. But I’m here to put my own, hopefully catchy spin on it!
If You’re Gonna Take a Break, Take a Real Break.
A whole break. A full break. Don’t take no half-assed break.
…Alright, fine, if life gets in the way, you can’t really help that. You probably shouldn’t rebel if a loved one needs you, or if, for any of life’s infinite reasons, you have to rise to a challenge. While that’s going on, you may be forced to put the work aside—or it might turn out that it’s healthiest to put the work aside. Maybe there’s creative work you can continue doing in your notes or in your mind.
…Alright, fine, if you’re working on a schedule or you don’t want to disappoint your fans, you might feel like this isn’t possible. Heck, it might even be true. But it’s worth it to do whatever you can to give yourself some place for whole-ass breaking.
For example, I recently went “on break” for a story I’m writing, but it was a fake-ass half-assed break. During that time, I was committed to keeping up a personal writing schedule to maintain the chapter backlog, even if that schedule was slower than my normal one. I also had some smaller projects to bridge the update gap. Plus, logically speaking, it was in my best interest to keep going and write as much as possible!
But for me, this was a trap. Now that I’m through with that “break” and have stepped back, I remember that all my schedules are arbitrary. This is a personal project! Nobody told me I had to write X amount of chapters within X days even on break.
What I should’ve done was make the break longer and split it up like this: give one end date to readers and another one to myself. For example, maybe I stop writing for one month (a real break), but I don’t post any more chapters for two months (where the second month is, really, not a break at all). I should have compartmentalized it in my mind so I could have a period of time where I never said, “I can’t relax, I need to be writing right now! For the people!”
So yeah, if your schedule isn’t guided by outside parties or market forces, you too might be putting too much stock in these arbitrary deadlines. Even if they are guided by outside parties or market forces, you might benefit from reanalyzing your strategy. Do you experience burnout? Do you feel like your breaks aren’t real breaks? Try to step back.
And you might just find that…
Your Body (or Emotions, or Subconscious, or Habitual Self-Talk) Needs to Catch Up with Your Mind.
When I have a problem and I cognitively know the solution/s, I may have to sit with that solution for a long time before I feel it start to sink in.
I might logically know, “This phobia is arbitrary. It shouldn’t scare me.” But that never stopped fear. Sometimes it takes letting my subconscious stew over it and come at the problem from many different angles.
Often my conscious thoughts are ahead of the eight ball, but the rest of me isn’t in gear. My nervous system might make me anxious. My subconscious thoughts might be ruled by some fear I’m not yet even aware of. But rather than kicking myself for feeling this way, I should give in to everything but the logical thoughts—without throwing the logical thoughts away. I should give myself what distance I can and breathe.
I haven’t returned to my current project “rejuvenated” or “brimming with energy.” It just feels easier, almost miraculously so. But…there’s no miracle. In my case, I think my positive, grounded self-talk has had a chance to sink in.
Split Those Tasks! Trend Upward!
And before I leave, I’d like to note a couple more ideas:
- Splitting half-assed breaks into full-assed breaks and non-breaks has something in common with splitting, well, I guess any task that feels overcomplicated, or overburdened with so many smaller tasks they’re disoriented. If something “should be easy” but it’s not, ya might just be taking too much of it on at once, without even knowing it. “Finish a novel” is scary, “finish outline of ch. 3” is nicer. For me, there’s a place for freeform play and a place for rigidly defined, separated tasks. Find a workflow that suits you!
- You know how people who advise you to take breaks might also mention getting eight hours of sleep, eight liters of water, or eight tubs of vegetables each day in the same breath? Well, I’m about to do basically that. But for me, it’s stressful to approach everything healthy all at once, and makes me more likely to drop the ball. What I’ve been doing is small healthy things that make me say to myself, “Well, a lot of people don’t even do this, so I guess I’m ahead of the curve.” Am I overcompetitive? Maybe…but as long as my need to feel superior to others can be bent in a positive direction (for once), I’ll accept this.
My point is, as long as your health and your positive habits are trending upward, or good and stable, you ain’t doing bad.
That’s it! That’s all! After a long and only somewhat involuntary break from novel-writing, I’m currently writing pretty voluminously. Will Book 3 of Catgirl System be finished this November? Um, doubtful, but nobody knows. Anyway, five chapters in a weekend’s not bad.
Thank you for reading, and Patrons, thank you for Patreonning.
I’m posting this shortly before December in the United States. You know what that means: we must satiate Big Christmas. Check out my distressing review of The Polar Express or, for something a bit more sedate, It’s a Wonderful Life. Or maybe this very critical, squinty look at all of Harry Potter! I think snow falls in those books.