Dear Writer, You Need to Quit (QuitBooks for Writers Book 1) by Syme Becca

Author:Syme, Becca [Syme, Becca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hummingbird Books
Published: 2019-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

Ten

Quit Heading for Burnout

The most acknowledged danger in this industry right now is the potential for people to burn out. I’ve had both clients and students who have burned out or gone through burnout, and I have also burned out myself. The signs are there and we largely ignore them because we think it won’t happen to us.

Trust me. It will.

No matter how big your plate is, it can be toppled by too much work for too long.

The speed of the market right now is part of the issue, but so is the desire to make money in the gold rush of Kindle. Most people who love writing have some kind of desire to write full- time—to be paid to write. That’s the dream, right?

Well, for some of us, that dream is costing us our mental and physical health, the health of our family and friendships. All for a dream that can be lost at any moment.

Do a quick inventory of your own life.

When was your last vacation? Did you work on that vacation? Were you constantly checking your KDP dashboard or your AMS ads to see if they’re performing?

When was your last really solid, deep, good sleep? When was the last time you woke up without an alarm and felt rested?

If you’re having trouble answering these questions, you need to re-frame the idea that work is the most important part of your life. When we see work as primary (or money as primary), we lose the benefit of what rest can provide. And not the kind of “checked-out” rest that Netflix binge-watching provides. Genuine, bored silence.

Because in the “bored silence”, our creative brains are working. 1 In fact, certain Strengths® need more of this bored silence to work more effectively, and one of the unfortunate byproducts of a focus on “productivity” (like all minutes are equally up for grabs) is that we often try to pull those “bored silence” times out of the schedule.

Yet most of us need those bored minutes. Instead, we’re filling them with podcasts and social media (and yes, #gasp, even books), and we’re not allowing our creative brains to do the work they need to do in order to make the depth of our thought possible. If you’re not spending time away from your phone or your computer, genuinely quiet (even if you’re doing some physical activity), you’re short-changing your capacity.

One of my very first clients was the picture of this. Brian had Strengths® that lent themselves to deep thinking, and he had also unfortunately been to a slew of productivity workshops and conferences (and read a couple of notable productivity for writers books) encouraging him to stop thinking and to use that time instead to write.

Stop thinking and draft the book.

That message stymied him. By the time he took Write Better-Faster , he’d lost months of productivity and written a couple of (in his words) awful books that he hated, trying to keep up with the book-a-month people.

We had a very tense conversation about Brian’s frustration levels, because he was under a lot of pressure to make money.

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