I am planning on writing a book about burnout. I don’t expect it out any time soon. I want time to gather my thoughts on the topic, but it’s one that I think is necessary to add to Writing Tips Series.
I suspect that burnout is one of the biggest obstacle a writer could ever face. The thing that makes it difficult is that it’s hard to detect. I don’t know about other writers, but it snuck up on me. I didn’t realize I was in the middle of it until I hit a point where I could not make myself write. My mind was a like a dry well. There was nothing to pull from in my creative brain. I technically knew what to write next because of the formula portion of storytelling, but I could not make myself write it. I had no enthusiasm for writing. I wanted to walk away from writing and never return. I thought I was done. I never imagined I could get my enthusiasm back. This was rock bottom.
It’s hard to explain what this feels like. All I can say is that during that time, I hated writing. I never thought I’d ever say that I hated writing, but I found myself at the point where it was true. The very thing I most loved since I was a teenager had become the thing I most hated. I wanted nothing to do with my characters ever again. I didn’t want to look at my books. I didn’t want to talk about story ideas. I just wanted that part of my life to go away. The irony in this is that, at my core, I’m still a writer. If I’m not a writer, then I have no identity. This left an alarming void in my life that scared and depressed me. I had lost my life’s purpose. That is rock bottom. And honestly, you can’t write through it. The only solution is to give it up for a season and do something else. In my case, I took a lot of walks. Other people at rock bottom will find other ways of coping.
I don’t see how you can get your enjoyment for writing back without putting a full stop to it when you’re in burnout mode, at least if the burnout is as severe as it was in my case. I barely did anything with books last year. I managed to finish the two books I was only a couple of chapters away from finishing. I had to keep telling myself these were my last books to get that task completed. At the time, I meant it because I didn’t think I’d ever want to write again. I even modified portions of one of those books to tie up all loose ends that could come back to haunt me. I dropped a romance I was planning for a secondary character who is now not getting a story, at least not with the plot I originally intended to give him. I rewrote a scene about another character (this one a lady) to leave things open enough to go without answering it in another book. It’s strange that I still had ideas for characters while not being able to write those ideas on paper. I guess creating ideas and writing them are really two different beasts.
I think I could have avoided this point of burnout if I had given myself longer breaks. An author friend did recommend I take half a year off from writing back when I started feeling exhausted when writing. I thought a month would be long enough, so I took a month instead. That didn’t work. All I did was kick the can down the road. That’s probably why I hit rock bottom.
So why didn’t I take a longer break? Because I am the main provider in my family. I was afraid that if I stopped writing, we wouldn’t be able to pay the bills. Making a living with your writing is a double-edged sword. The thing I hear most from writers is how much they want to make a living with their writing so they can quit their day job. It might be easy to get to that point, but when you have to keep writing books to keep the income up enough to pay the bills year after year, it takes a toll on you. I had no trouble writing romances when I started them in 2007. In fact, I couldn’t write fast enough to get all of the stories down. That streak lasted for years. I didn’t start having serious difficulty keeping up the momentum until about 2018. I started losing income in 2016, but I was able to keep the interest level up.
The desire to write because you have stories bursting to get out is not the same as having to write because you need to pay the bills. The former gives you energy. The latter takes it away. It is hard to write when you have to. The longer you write because you have to, the harder it is to keep the enthusiasm up for storytelling. Looking back, I believe this is the early stages of burnout. It’s doable. You can work through it. It’s easy to think, “This is a job. Butt in chair. Get those words out.” You just brush this off by thinking that every job has it’s ups and downs. You just happen to be in a “down” day. Then the “down” days get to be more frequent. You take a week off here and there, but eventually, that doesn’t help. You take a longer period of time off, but you can’t do that for too long because you have bills to pay. You can market your books, but publishing a new book is typically the best way to make the most money. And the faster you can get the books out, the better you’re able to pay your bills. This is a cycle that could end up with you feeling trapped. You have no choice. You have to write. And you start to realize you hate this job. This is nature of burnout if you don’t address it sufficiently. If you are going to make this your day job, save up money first so you can give yourself all the time you need to get out of burnout mode.
Anyway, I am going to look at the different aspects of burnout and see if I can figure out a way to put them into a book to help writers who might be facing the same thing I did. If anyone can think of a topic that fits within the burnout topic, please let me know.
Ruth Ann Nordin's Author Blog 