Good morning everyone!
Have you ever pushed yourself to the point you either didn’t care or couldn’t bring yourself to write or edit anymore?
I know I have. Several times for different things and at different times. I also know my problem is I tend to throw myself into something to the point I don’t sleep, eat, or relax until said task is done. Over the years, I learned to pace myself, but that’s the easy part.
We’re all creatures of habit, and sometimes we can’t help but push ourselves to the point of insanity. Trying to prevent that can be a tricky thing, and even more so if we burn ourselves out.
One thing I’ve found that has helped me to keep from overworking myself is setting a goal for a project. For me, it was easier to stop after writing a chapter a day. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I generally write 1600 to 3300 words per chapter, so I do get a decent workout.
Choosing this limit was easier than I expected for a simple reason: It exhausts me. It doesn’t matter if I complete it in one or a few hours, by the end I’m wiped out after writing that much. It also gives me the chance to think about where the next chapter is going (I’m mainly a pantzer) instead of plowing ahead and having to rewrite it the next day. It also helps I’m extremely anal and my first draft is roughly 85% of my final. lol
Another little trick is to set an alarm and forget there’s a clock ticking down. Sometimes, being under the gun can help the juices flow and we can crank out a good portion in the allotted time. The limit is solely up to each of us, but I found I write about five pages an hour when I’m cruising along, so two often works best for me. To be honest, this may result in you having some holes to go back and fill in later, and that’s all right. We won’t always think of everything right away and there’s no harm in coming back to it later on. Trust me, you don’t want to stress out over the little things early on.
Sometimes a competition with others can benefit us as well. Anyone that’s taken part in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and met in your local write-ins, you probably took part in word wars. For those that haven’t enjoyed the rush, word wars are where everyone in attendance attepts to write as much as possible in a time limit from five to twenty minutes. The limit can vary and the desire to crank out the most words does get the juices flowing. While this is similar to using a time limit, it can help to get out a large amount of words in a short time and you can always come back to fill in any blanks later.
Taking part in writing groups in person or online can offer a great deal of push and inspiration as well. How often do we become inspired from simply talking with someone? Maybe they’d be interested in being your writing buddy and you could meet up once a week or whatever your schedules permit? You never know until you ask, but it’s surprising how many are going through the same things we are.
Now, if we decide to damn the torpedoes and move full speed ahead and we burn ourselves out, we need to deal with that. My advice is to try to avoid this, but if it happens the thing that’s worked best for me is rest. Plain and simple, old fashioned rest. How long varies for each of us. My periods have ranged from a couple of days to a month, so I try to avoid pushing myself to that point.
As with anything, what works differs with each of us. If you have any concerns about what to do, please do your research into the dos and don’ts before jumping in.
What works best for you? Have you found any tricks or tips I haven’t mentioned? I love to hear about them.
"J.R." Hafer
I liked your article. However, in my opinion there is a difference in burnout and writers-block. Perhaps a discussion on that would be interesting. Everyone handles it differently. Intimidation can be a form of writers block. Procrastination another sign of burnout or writer’s block how can we tell the difference?
CP Bialois
I totally agree that the two couldn’t be more different. I look at burnout as not being able to bring ourselves to write out of lack of interest or fatigue, while writer’s block is not knowing what to write for whatever reason. Funny that you mention that. I have a blog post written about writer’s block and dealing with it. I was going to post it in a couple of weeks, but I’ll post it for next Monday so it can follow this one. 🙂
I think it depends on why you’re procrastinating. The procrstinators I know do it simply because they don’t want to do something, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other reasons. As you said, we all handle things differently.