The Grasshopper #15: Burn Out
It’s normal and fixable
My brain is a little fried and made noises this morning about taking a few days off from writing. These days I’m not very good about that, but it is summer after all, so I might do it. Might…
These days I’m doing this newsletter twice a week and publishing articles on Medium, typically daily. And I have an idea for a second newsletter that would allow me to make my political stuff accessible without readers having to pay for a Medium subscription, which by the way, is a great deal because it gets you access to everything published there. And it helps writers get paid.
But my subject today is burnout, which simply means your writing brain is tired. Since I am a little burned out today, this will be a little shorter than usual.
Why you should be taking a break as a creator
Writing or any other creative activity when you are tired will not lead to your best work. Nor will writing when you are drinking, despite all the myths about heavy drinking writers, something Ernest Hemingway wrote about as he created his own mythology. But he wrote in the morning during his peak period, long before those martinis at the Ritz.
But it was also Hemingway who taught us the key to writing daily in his memoir of Paris, A Moveable Feast. His rule to avoid burnout and stay fresh was to always stop when things are going well, rather than overextending yourself. He called this ‘leaving some gas in the tank’ for the next session.
That is very good advice, regardless of what kind of writing you’re doing. The reality is that trying too hard results in writing that has a tired, worked over feel. There is something to be said for keeping things fresh and leaving some energy for the next day.
But sometimes that’s not enough and that’s when to walk away, forget about what you’re working on and do something else or get out of town, even better.
Yesterday I got six hundred words into an article about early stage startups, something that used to be a passion of mine. But I stopped because I realized I just didn’t care about the topic anymore. I’ve moved on and the writing showed it because it wasn’t hanging together the way it should.
I’ll let that one go. I could finish it but I simply don’t want to. So, in a kind of reversal of Hemingway’s gas in the tank metaphor, I let it run out of fuel.
Before I finished my first novel I had several false starts that ran into dead-ends, points where I did not know where to take it. Some of these were quite long, 60-100 pages, and it can be hard to let that much work go. But I have not looked back and they don’t do anything for me anymore.
Either I burned out or they did. And I’m glad I had the discipline to walk away from that article yesterday and just give myself the rest of the day off.
It is summer after all. Get out and enjoy it!