Dear Writer, Are You In Burnout? (QuitBooks for Writers Book 2) by Syme Becca

Author:Syme, Becca [Syme, Becca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hummingbird Books
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

Seven

The Slide: Factors

About a year ago, I met a writer at a national conference who was well-known enough, I had several of her books already on my shelf. She’d heard about a class I was giving and asked to meet with me to discuss whether the class was for her or not.

She was already writing at top speeds, and didn’t feel like she needed to go any faster than she was—which was an anomaly for me, so I was interested already.

But she did want to write more hours in the day. She had some aggressive release plans over the next two years, and she wanted higher word counts, but not because she thought she was writing slow.

So we covered her current schedule and how much time she had to give. Let me tell you, it was zero.

And she wasn’t doing some of the things that others were often doing to take up time that they felt they should be using to write. She wasn’t getting lost on blogs or in podcasts, she didn’t have a social media addiction (I can’t even remember if she was active on social media—that’s how small a factor it was for her), she didn’t need a lot of time to process her books so she wasn’t using large chunks of time for thinking. She was reading regularly, but she was adamant (and correctly so) that she needed that in order to stay motivated to work.

She was definitely doing a lot of marketing and advertising, but not “so much” that it was an obvious place to cut. She was already into the (what wasn’t at the time, but what is now very) common strategy of heavy iteration of every one of her marketing facets, trying to find the best performing one of them all.

Add to that her incredibly full personal schedule. She had some projects she didn’t want to drop (not writing related) for really valid reasons, and she had a busy family.

We brainstormed every possible way of getting time back, and we just couldn’t find any. Not because there were no options, but because she wasn’t willing to give up control over any element of that system. She wouldn’t hire someone to drive her kids to their meetings (as is common with a lot of parents, she felt like it was her responsibility to care for her own kids—and there’s nothing wrong with that, it just does mean that you then have to either limit what activities your kids can do, or you have to drive them). She wouldn’t give up the side projects, she wouldn’t get off the board she was on, she wouldn’t stop volunteering. In essence, she kept rejecting every place to get time back, and yet still wanted more time. (If you can’t hear the unrealistic expectation under that, then you may fall into the same camp that she did. Wanting to do more than you are capable of doing. Not uncommon among highly driven people.) You can’t simultaneously want more time and also not be willing to give up anything that you’re currently doing.

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