This is something that I’ve been avoiding thinking about, or looking squarely at for some time now. Until the last few weeks, I wasn’t even certain what was going on, but I’m now fairly convinced that I’m wandering along the borderlands of burnout.
I also think this is a mixed burnout. It’s not just writing related. My lecturing work is very demanding, and is exactly the sort of role where burnout classically occurs. It is the sort of job where there is literally is no limit the amount of time I could invest, and to some degree, the expectations are that I should be investing as much time as humanly possible. I need to be thinking very seriously about how to navigate this.
I’m also experiencing a distinct and separate writing burnout as well. This feels quite different from writer’s block, and after casting around the internet a little, it seems other people agree with me that writing burnout is its own thing. It’s characterised by just hitting a wall and stopping… stopping writing, yes, but stopping with reading, stopping with engaging with stories at all. It isn’t so much an inability to produce, or a blankness of ideas, but rather a total and overwhelming exhaustion. I’ve described the feeling to a friend as being something like the sensation of being a spaceship, on fire and listing into the gravity well of a planet. It feels as if my brain is slowly seeping blood.
But I’ve decided that it is time to face this down. With regards to the writing burnout I can take some steps to improve things. What are my steps?
- Return to writing every day, even if it is just a sentence, or half a sentence, or just one word. Anything counts.
- Target and knock off small tasks: I have too many things on my to-do list, and many of them are gigantic ongoing things that may take years to complete. I need some smaller victories, and I need to start knocking off a few smaller tasks. I might focus on either knocking out a few short stories and/or submitting some of the short stories I have sitting around.
- Do some free-writing. One of the things that has been weighing on me a bit is that the older style of the Clay-o’-the-Green stories isn’t the only mode I like to write in, and various other styles (mostly more contemporary, maybe a bit more literary) are feeling ignored. I think I might need to stretch myself back into some other styles.
- Keep posting A Charm for the Nameless Child, but in small parts, and linked to a format that is easy to read. I thought I would be posting this a chapter at a time (because it is already written, after all), but the prospect of editing and posting 2-4000 words just stopped me short. I’m going to go back to 1-2000 a week. That worked for me. I’m going to go back to it.
All right then. That will do for now. I may actually see if I can keep up some regular posting here too. That might be a good thing in terms of keeping my mind on the ball. I also have some ideas and thoughts around burnout and recovery that I want to explore and share.
That’s it for now. It’s a bit late here, but I’m going to try opening up a file and doing some of that free-writing for a few minutes. Any words are good words.