How to Avoid Burn-Out and Writer’s Block in 2020
You must go on. I can’t go on.[1] This has been a sort of mantra that plays itself out in my mind these days. As a writer who adamantly does not believe in writer’s block and yet am struggling myself to write, I find these words circling inside of me until inevitably (and lately, painstakingly) I arrive at I’ll go on. I wish I could say that I was above the need to be a productivity obsessed individual motivated by capitalist grind-culture, but as someone who was raised by a hardworking, single-mom and ate “saltine pizza bites” in our single-wide trailer as a young child, grinding is practically embedded into my DNA.
Two weeks after I turned 18, I moved to California to attend art school, applied for work the day I unloaded my boxes, and was employed full-time as a barista and hostess before classes even began. I continued the trajectory of maintaining 2+ jobs as a full-time student for nearly a decade until I earned my master’s degree last Spring. For my thesis, I wrote a novel manuscript that I have spent the last year revising and have recently begun (slowly) querying for agented representation (which, as a side note, is a demoralizing process to entertain while the world seems to fall apart around me and one which has led to questioning my ego to an uncomfortable degree).
Currently, when not dreading what to do with the novel I spent 2.5 years of my life writing, I teach full-time (which is weird during a pandemic) and take part-time classes towards clearing my preliminary teaching credential. So yeah, I guess you could say that I grind. Have been comfortable in the grind. Have made it my home for many years without really ever questioning it. If you grow up poor with a chip on your shoulder, it is a natural state of being. Recently, I have begun reevaluating my natural states. One does this, I think, during a global pandemic. I no longer want to grind. I am becoming disillusioned to the institution that is the hyper-capitalist-productivity-without-question wheel which birthed the grind.
I am not sure exactly when this disillusionment began, but I do know it started sometime between the March 17th Shelter-in-place orders that went out in the Bay Area where I live due to Covid-19 and the world-wide protests demanding justice for Black lives after the murder of George Floyd. Every day hundreds died. Someone was murdered. People took to the streets. Police cars were burned. Citizens demanding justice were blinded and bruised by rubber bullets. Free speech was choked out by chemical warfare. The governor begged that masks be worn. Red hats demanded that people return to work. My administration sent out email after email about how to keep students engaged through distance learning. Moms called me crying to say they had no Wi-Fi, no device, no way their child could participate in distance learning. Work Progress Reports for students were due. Ads for productivity apps appeared ever more present on the glow of my screen. Contradiction was everywhere. How does a writer write in this climate? How do you not think, I can’t go on?
In my writing group (a true lifeline to my creative self these days), we’ve spent many meetings discussing the difficulty of writing in these past few months. The difficulty of being a person, parent, spouse, etc. in these months. As a staunch type-A and writer’s block denier, I admitted that writing was hard. 5+ days a week I showed up to the page as I have done for years and I wrote. This mostly took form in the revision of my novel until just weeks ago when I felt that I had revised it as far as I could personally take it without outside help and was forced to face that daunting blank page again. As I expressed the existential dread of writing in a world that felt shattered and unstable, a member of my group simply said, write fucking anything but the thing you feel you should be writing.
In grind culture, most of what fuels us is an understanding of what we should be doing rather than what we need to be doing. The sentiment resonated with me, and so, I spent two weeks writing something no one asked or expected me to write – an anniversary book for my husband anthologizing our 8 years together. It is the most honest thing I have written to date and has led to more personal insight than anything else I have ever penned. It was also the catalyst for this list of ways to tap into creativity that avoid burn-out and hopefully raise a middle finger to the hyper-capitalist expectation to grind our bodies down to dust for an illusion of success or happiness or completeness that is promised at the end so long as we just keep producing.
A photo of the book I made my husband for our wedding anniversary
Ways to Avoid Writer Burn-Out
Write fucking anything but the thing you feel you should be writing. For me, this was a small, Moleskine book for my husband declaring my love for him over the years. Next, it is a journaling series I am doing with my sister-in-law. Each day we pick a prompt and write for 15-30 minutes with no concern for where those pages end up.
Some Ideas for Other Writings:
Write a book-reflection journal. Choose a book you love or one that has been on your TBR pile for too long and after each chapter or session reading, write a reflection in your notebook about what you read. This can take place in the form of prose or poetry. Steal a line from the book and use it as the first line for a poem or story. Or simply respond to what the text made you feel.
Go to a park or somewhere else you can safely practice social distancing and transcribe everything you see and hear. Do not editorialize. Simply be a vessel for what you see/hear. People are talking about real shit these days and you might learn something new while also getting a feel for how dialogue works.
Pick a random prompt each day, set a 15-30-minute timer, and write into the prompt without thinking too much or worrying about what will happen with those pages.
Educate Yourself. Read non-mainstream media news sources. Read books that challenge your thinking. Watch films and documentaries about things you are unfamiliar with. Take advantage of the many free or low-cost online classes happening right now. Not only will this make you more well-rounded (and hopefully more empathetic), but creativity is often sparked by learning something new.
Take a nap. Daily. During quarantine I started following the @napministry founded by Tricia Hersey. Her teachings and theory on the connection between resistance and napping are radical and enlightening.
Get Sober. Feel Feelings. Now this is a new one for me, so I don’t feel I have much authority to speak on it, but I recently got sober after self-medicating for 15 years. Six years ago I stopped using narcotics but still imbibed in regular alcohol consumption. I believed it to be the way of the creative. Saw it as a facet of writerly life. For me, it isn’t. It is numbing. While I am just beginning this new path to my own interiority and personhood without substances, I can feel a creative energy beginning to emerge I thought might not exist beneath the veil.
Read Short Fiction. I know many people who are struggling to read longer works these days and have instead resorted to a panic-inducing doom-scrolling paralysis. Attention is hard to come by. Luckily, the web is full of wonderful short fiction (and flash fiction for those with truly tapped reserves) you can read for free.
Be of Service to Someone Else. Whether it is a family member who doesn’t feel comfortable leaving the house to get groceries or a friend who needs someone to listen to, if global isolation has taught us nothing else, I hope it is that relationships are sacred and should be treated as such. If you have the emotional, financial, or physical ability to help a stranger in some way at this time (whether it is donating to a cause, handing out lunches to school children, or something else close to your heart) then do that too. Writing, after all, is a form of connecting to the larger world, and when we practice it in our daily lives it only makes sense that it would trickle back into our work.
Exercise. We often think of the body and the mind as wholly separate beings, but the two coexist, and as such, so does creativity and movement.
Actively don’t write for a set period of time. This is scary for those type-A folks who have daily word counts and page quotas to meet, but if we are going to dismantle our relationship to the ever-moving hamster wheel then the first step is to jump off. Make a conscious choice not to write and replace that time with something else that you find fulfilling and may have neglected in your race to fill the page. The page will still be there waiting after you have tended to the other parts of yourself.
[1] Quoted from The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
