5 Ways to Avoid Burnout as an Author

by Dave Chesson

Maybe it's just me, but sometimes I can't seem to find enough hours in the day to do everything that needs to get done.

In these instances, I often feel exhausted and drained, and don't even want to write even when I have time.

I'm sure you've experienced it: the dreaded burnout. It's a real thing and happens to all of us at some point or another, but as someone who has written thousands of words while also dealing with dyslexia since I was a child, I've come up with a few key tactics to help.

Here are five ways to avoid burnout! 

Make Time for Yourself

Don't be afraid to turn off the computer/laptop/tablet etc., close your eyes, and just relax!  Take a walk outside if you can, or sit down with a good book. 

Additionally, you need to make sure you are taking enough breaks within your day, on your weekend, as well as taking vacations throughout the year.

This, perhaps more than any other tactic on this list, is one of the most important. If you wait until you are burnt out to take a vacation, it will not work as effectively. You need to plan these things ahead in order to gain the most benefit from them.

This is why I recommend scheduling your breaks. Use a Pomodoro timer or something similar during the day to make sure you get enough time to breathe, and make sure that you have time off actually scheduled in your calendar.

Find a system that works for you, and you will not regret it.

Measure Your Progress

One of the best ways to get motivated and stay motivated is to track your progress.

This can be done in a number of ways, from simply writing down how many words you write each day and checking it off as the days go by, or using one of dozens of apps designed for authors available online. You can even use a simple spreadsheet to do this.

I think you will be surprised at how motivated you get just by seeing how far you've come. This is one of the key aspects of motivation: you find it when you see success. 

And you can't truly see success, unless you are tracking your progress.

Try Dictation

If you are burnt out, or facing burnout, perhaps you could learn to write smarter instead of harder.

One way to work smarter and therefore write faster, is with dictation. 

With a good dictation software like Dragon Home or an equivalent, and with a little practice, you can write a lot more efficiently in the same time it took you to write before.

This doesn't necessarily mean that you should write more. In fact, it might be a better idea to not write more.

Simply write the same amount that you were doing before, and you will find that you do it in far less time, leaving room for you to do other things, not the least of which is tactic #1 above: taking breaks.

I've personally found that dictation has saved me time, which gives me more space to breathe, not to mention saving my fingers and wrists from a little bit of strain.

(I dictated this article by the way.)

Outsource the Tasks You Least Enjoy

If you're like me, one of the biggest reasons for your burnout is that there are simply too many tasks on your list.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

A solution would be to outsource some of these not-so-fun jobs (like bookkeeping) and hire someone else who can do them more efficiently than yourself. This will free up valuable time which you can then use to take breaks or write even faster with that dictation software!

Outsourcing can cost money but keep in mind that your time is valuable. Literally, you can assign a monetary value to your time.

Figure out how much money you make in an hour, then decide how many hours you work to do a certain task, then look at how much it would cost to pay someone else to do that same task. If the cost of outsourcing is less then the hourly cost of you doing it, then maybe it would be a good idea to outsource.

That's not to mention, outsourcing these troublesome tasks can take a load off of your mind, and sometimes that alone can make it worth it.

Follow a Healthy Lifestyle

Lastly, I'd like to talk about one of the most important items on this list that is often overlooked, and that is your health.

I'm not just talking about your mental health, I'm talking about your physical health. The two are inseparably connected.

In my own experience, I found that when I eat better and exercise, my mind is more alert, I have more energy, and I make fewer mistakes.

There is no doubt that burnout is closely associated with physical well-being. To affect one is to affect the other.

Now I'm not a medical professional, and can't give medical advice, but I do recommend that you seek out a personal trainer, a dietitian, or at the very least your primary care doctor to discuss ways in which you can take your health to the next level so you can avoid burnout.

I recommend The Healthy Writer by Joanna Penn and Dr. Euan Lawson, for more on this topic.

Final Thoughts

With so many different tactics to try, it may be difficult to know which one is best for your personal situation.

That’s why I want you to choose the tactic that sounds most appealing and give it a shot.

Whether you use dictation software or hire an editor, any solution is better than feeling burnt out from writing all day, every day. 

Dave Chesson is the creator of Kindlepreneur.com, a website devoted to teaching advanced book Marketing which even Amazon KDP acknowledge as one of the best by telling users to “Gain insight from Kindlepreneur on how you can optimize marketing for your books.” Having worked with such authors as Orson Scott Card, Ted Dekker and more, his tactics help both Fiction and Nonfiction authors of all levels get their books discovered by the right readers.

On Expressing Thematic Concerns

by Elizabeth Kirschner

I’d like to say a few words about the expression of one’s thematic concerns, or obsessions, that is, how they find their way into the poem, piece of memoir, story.

All the old idioms insist that the writer’s obsessions must be expressed, not stated. That sounds fairly oblique. As does Pound’s insistence, “Go in fear of abstractions,” or William Carlos Williams dictum “no meaning, but in things.”

It all has to be expressed in a highly physical manner. The reader must be able to intuit what the writer is trying to say via the senses: smell, taste, sound, sight, touch.

 By means of example, here’s a passage from one of my own stories:

“I place my hands deep in my brother’s moccasins which I haven’t moved from the rocker’s seat. I wear them that way for a minute, ridiculous mittens, then put them back, nestle them close as veterans sharing identical scars.

It’s self-portrait after self-portrait: my profile shaded in ash, prim as trash, the curve of cheek rounded in vegetable peel. A face of unidentified viscera.

The shadows of snowflakes, flickering like dark birds. My father spoke, my mother listened. They occurred, like a sink full of water, voices a cloth submerged, unclean in the equine rot of night.

If we note the physical language, we can get a feeling for what this narrator is feeling:

After putting her brother’s slippers on her hands, like “mittens” she nestles them close, “like veterans.” The word “veterans” connote experience, does it not? One in which the narrator and the brother even share “scars.”

In this way, we begin to deduce a few things about their childhood, that it may be “war-like,” yet the word “mittens” suggests warmth, comfort, until we hit that discomfiting word, “ridiculous,” which undercuts our presumptions.

Note how the speaker’s self portrait is conveyed. “Shaded in ash.” “Prim as trash.” Such a description suggests an older narrator, not a child, but language is how the reader constructs a palpable sense of who each character is.

“Trash” is a powerful word. Coupled with “prim,” we get a clear sense of how the speaker views herself.

The reader’s thinking is further colored by “the shadow of snowflakes.” Note the position of the word “shadow,” how it dominates, overpowers the word “snowflakes.”

Both words represent actual things, i.e., we can see, even smell a “shadow.” Put a verb with it, then we can even hear it, “the shadow sings.”

Likewise, a snowflake has a physical presence. In this instance, it’s flickering like “dark birds.” This creates a mood, does it not?

Then we come to the parents. Who “occurred.” Note how inanimate that feels, how this gives them more thingness than presence, especially as it’s expressed in past tense. The word “occurred” is immediately backed into a simile, “like a sink full of water.”

The work of simile and metaphor is to compound things, to layer in complexity, let language work double-time. “A sink full of water,” denotes inertia, uncleanliness. This is characterization.

Note that the parents’ voices are submerged, “a cloth,” which suggests a desire for erasure. The passage ends with, “In the equine rot of night.” Consider the sensory impact of these words. How “equine” qualifies “rot.”

Isn’t the reader left with a disquieting portrait? Doesn’t the word “rot” color the whole passage? Note that, this far, I haven’t “stated” what this story is “about.” The idea is for it to unfold, sentence by sentence.

Here’s the ending to a different story:

“Her cries tasted like limes. As I walked down the spit, crabs scuttled on the beach. Increasingly human, increasingly scowling, so helpless, warlike.

With the scowls of warriors imprinted on their backs, each was a solitary criminal. They reminded me of my sister, Harmon, the painting, which created its own vocabulary, stiff as a broken neck, or a trinity of moths, the color of waxed paper.”

We look for clues in the text to help us interpret what the writer is trying to express. “Her cries tasted like limes,” is an image of freshness, tartness. It is even intimate, as it suggests that the speaker is literally tasting “her cries.”

Next we latch onto the crabs scuttling on the beach. We “see” the crabs. Their physicality is made more complex and concrete by the fact that they’re “scowling.”

Personification, then. The crabs are given human qualities, which makes them more menacing. Stories need a little menace, a sense of threat, that’s where the tension comes from.

But these crabs. Not only are they “increasingly” scowling, they are also “helpless,” “warlike.” Might this be interpreted as the writer’s sense of the human predicament? Isn’t it further complicated by the notion that each one is “a solitary criminal?”

This is how the writer’s obsessions get expressed. In the sheer physicality  of the language. Every single word must carry significant weight, if it is to earn its place in any particular piece of work.

 Another short passage:

“When I go to sleep, I’m vinegar inside clouded glass. The world comes to an end when I wake up, violence is underwhelming, my mouth, a guarded hearse as the incomprehensible shuffles into place.”

What concerns, obsessions can we glean out of this? What do the actual words suggest?

Clearly, the speaker sees herself as astringent. She has the sense that the world “ends” every time she wakes up, that “violence” is “underwhelming.” Even her mouth is a “guarded hearse,” as the “incomprehensible” comes into play in that last phrase.

Kirschner.png

Aren’t some of her obsessions made apparent here. How can we not feel her sense of mortality if she experiences every morning as an ending? We know she’s preoccupied with “violence” and the “incomprehensible.”

Doesn’t the story itself try to explicate, or put into action, some of these concerns? Given this paragraph, might not the reader expect some kind of violence, underwhelming, or otherwise to transpire? Might that act of violence lead to the speaker’s mouth feeling like a “guarded hearse?” Doesn’t violence compound our sense of the “incomprehensible?”

In this manner, the story can become the vehicle, the tenor, through which the writer can express, via all the elements of fiction, his or her deepest obsessions.

Plot, characterization, setting, conflict or suspense, some sense of the dramatic that necessarily seeks resolution. POV is involved, as someone, i.e., a character, has to have a distinct vantage point.

 Setting is the place to stand. No story can occur without a precise location in time and space. For example:

 “Outside the door, the warped distortion of mundane things—utility poles spook the blue, evergreens offer sinister shade—malevolent, nefarious, corrupt.”

The reader can participate in this: he or she can look outside that door, see a kind of warped perspective on things as ordinary as utility poles and evergreens.

The utility poles are “spooked.” The evergreens offer “sinister” shade. Coupled with the three bleak adjectives at the end of the sentence: “malevolent, nefarious and corrupt,” we are once again being influenced, or seduced by the writer.

This is how it works: the writer employs all there is in his or her powers to express, quite simply and complexly, that which can’t be expressed any other way. There must be an urgency, a fierce sense of immediacy and necessity, i.e., the writer must put everything at stake.

If there isn’t a feeling that the story must be told, at all costs, then it’s likely to fail. In this way, it’s akin to love. If one doesn’t give into it in its entirety, if one isn’t wholly vulnerable and committed, the attempt is likely to be utterly doomed.

It’s the attempt that matters. Something will arise out of the attempt, especially if the effort has been wholeheartedly made.

 Revision is, shall we say, the house of correction, the place where we can go back and forward, over and over again, until the thing that might have been made in haste, due to that profound sense of urgency, can be remade, reshaped, seen anew.

This is where the writer can luxuriate, take an inordinate amount of time, to make what she or he is trying to say, as nearly perfect as only the imperfect can.

Doesn’t the story call us back to all that matters: bone, skin, that fragment of you surviving in me as I open my mouth to speak? Isn’t it one way to return to the living?

 Aren’t stories, with their tornado of moments, a brief sojourn into what makes us most human? Don’t they dismantle and remake what the heart names in some insatiable and utterly inexplicable manner?

 In this way, stories swaddle up like capillaries as they pass through the years slowly, in hope of a metamorphosis. I crave that moment of transformation.

 The story may begin in hell and end up in paradise, or vice versa, but the journey, the deeply going into and the sometimes horrifying reemergence, the whole mystifying process wherein one thing becomes another, a process which absolutely encapsulates the mystery of narrative and the narrative of mystery, this is why I write, humbly and at times feebly, I write because it always holds me in thrall, and this is how I praise, or practice praising what I feel is the whole human catastrophe.

Elizabeth Kirschner is the author of BECAUSE THE SKY IS A THOUSAND SOFT HURTS, her debut collection of short stories. She has published five volumes of poetry, most recently, MY LIFE AS A DOLL,  Autumn House Press, 2008, and SURRENDER TO LIGHT, Cherry Grove Editions, 2009. The former was nominated for the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Patterson Book Prize and named Kirschner as the Literary Arts Fellow in the state of Maine, 2010. Her memoir, WALKING THE BONES is forthcoming from The Piscataqua Press, February, 2015.

Kirschner has been writing and teaching multi-genres across four decades. She served as faculty in Fairfield University’s low-residence MFA in Creative Writing Program and has also taught at Boston College and Carnegie-Mellon University. She currently serves as a writing mentor and manuscript consultant and teaches various workshops in and around her community in Kittery Point, ME.