HOW TO WRITE PRODUCTIVELY (WITHOUT BURNING OUT)

How to make progress when writing your book:

After discussing book-planning mistakes last week, I've been thinking a lot about other beliefs that appear productive, but aren’t.

The desire to do more, more, more has crept in like a virus.

In reality, the push to supersize our lives has been in the works for far longer than that. Often the feeling that we need more and need to be more is what keeps us overworked in service to acquiring things.

The impact hits us hard, especially for our creativity, for several reasons:

Creativity doesn't like to be quantified or supersized.

It simply wants to exist for its own sake. Our creative self doesn't shout from the rooftops with a megaphone the way the critic does. The creative self slips into the in-between moments, when things are quiet and perhaps even, >gasp< boring.

Remember those?

Sometimes the most productive thing to do is … nothing.

When we get sucked into the “more is better” mentality, it infects our writing process, too.

If I write 1,000 words a day, then surely writing 2,000 words a day is better? Right?

Not necessarily.

Writing doesn’t always look like typing at the keyboard.

In a much-beloved episode of the Secret Library Podcast, V.E. Schwab shared this observation. There are a lot of activities that make up writing a book, and many of them don’t look like writing at all.

Your process might include:

Reading
Watching documentaries
Going for a walk to think
Doodling
Talking to friends
Staring into space
Getting ideas in the shower and flailing around to write them down
Taking a nap

Activities that support writing are also writing

It takes energy and fuel to write a book, and our writing time is just as much about gathering creative firewood as it is about making the fire.

Writing for days and weeks on end without re-fueling is like driving a car until it runs out of gas, or expecting a fire to keep burning when there’s no more wood.

If you want to write efficiently, plan refueling in advance

Many people believe that going on a writing retreat is productive because you can write a bazillion hours a day.

In fact, I find the productivity of a retreat comes from the increased time for refueling.

Even on retreat, I write about 2 hours a day max.

I spend the rest of the day refueling:

reading
napping
talking about books over meals
staring into space
taking walks
browsing in bookshops

The fact that refueling is taking up at least half the day supercharges those two hour writing sessions on retreat.

You can get this same effect in regular life if you add at least one refueling break for every two writing sessions.

If you want to get more out of the time you spend writing, plan refueling breaks along with your writing time.

Your refueling may look different than anyone else’s. You know best what perks you up when you feel run down or burnt out.

Keep a list of those activities and make sure you include them in your schedule alongside your writing.

The critic may try to tell you they aren’t actually writing. Ignore it.

If you exercise, you need to stretch, too. This is no different.

Stay refueled and you’ll get way more writing done in a shorter time. This is counter-intuitive, but after hundreds of clients and students have had the same experience, I can confidently share it with you here.

Put those refueling breaks in your calendar now and see the result in days.