Writer Burnout as You Approach The End
Yeah, yeah, I know, writing a book is a marathon. Don’t remind me, because I’m feeling the burn, baby! Here are Seven Signs you may be utterly toxic from struggling to the end of that elusive finish line:
–Coffee, ordinarily delicious and comforting and an aid to your muse, tastes bitter and disgusting and you never want another cup again.
–Your husband arrives home to find you in tears. Mumbling how you are in the last 50 pages and your book makes no sense and you think you have to delete the whole thing and start over.
–To take a break, you read a great, fabulous author because you only read the best when you are finishing your best draft, but instead of inspiring you, you start to cry. “I can never write like that! Why bother?” (This time it’s Kristan Higgins, The Best Man. So wonderful!)
–Your ass hurts from BICHOK (Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard). And your hamstrings, and your calves, and all the tendons in your hands.
–You know that this, your “final” draft, is almost done. You pray for it to be done. All you want is relief. Your characters are suffering, heading right into that blackest of moments, and you are contemplating heading out the window. You are laughing, weeping, mumbling to yourself, and in total despair. And just to tip yourself over the edge, you know this will not be THE final draft. Beta readers, agent will say no no no and you will have to wash and repeat. Probably multiple more times.
–You appear in public in sweats. Your deepest darkest secret is sometimes you don’t even dress until just before your kids come home from school.
–You keep saying, “I’ll clean [insert something appropriate here]______ when I’m done,” a task you despise. But right now it’s looking pretty good as a diversion. Scary!
I don’t know how this marathon will end. All I want is to muscle through and be done. I pound my head against the keyboard and drink my bitter coffee (better than eating through the fridge). I’m not a believer in waiting for inspiration to strike. Every day I sit here and slog it out, and every day I fix the slog from the day before. And most days I do this with a kind of joy I’ve never experienced before.
But burn out is burn out and when it reaches this level, sometimes you have to cave in to it and replete the muse by taking a damn day off. Maybe even two. Because you simply cannot write if you are insane. So today…I’m outa here!
Combating burnout…suggestions welcome!
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| South Carolina beach, a more tranquil place than my mind today! |
Writers: So Maybe Hearing Voices Isn’t That Crazy After All
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| One confused little violet who thinks it’s May instead of October. |
I had this crazy idea to ask everyone, well, my writer friends anyway, why they write. I don’t know why, maybe (make that probably) to understand why I write. If you really stop and think about it, we spend months writing a story, living with the characters we create talking in our heads, waking us up at night and forcing us to write their words on sticky notes before we forget them.
Does this sound familiar?
More importantly, is this normal?
The mission of understanding why we (I) write with regard to our (my) mission in life is a really big topic that can’t be tackled all at once, but I read something recently that helped me understand something really intrinsic about myself…like, maybe I’m not so crazy after all.
The great writer and activist George Orwell (1903-1950), whom we all know from his classic novels Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, wrote an essay in 1946 called Why I Write. Here’s one of many parts that caught my eye (It’s a little long but I’ve bolded what I thought was fascinating):
“But side by side with all this [writing activities he describes], I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my ‘story’ ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted onto the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across tot he window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf’, etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The ‘story’ must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.”
This just bowled me over. The description of an inner narrative that reads like a book…does anybody else’s brain do this? Well, mind does and that is scary, but to have it described, well…it’s very validating! Like, it might just be almost normal to hear voices in your head (if you’re a writer, anyway).
So do you hear voices in your head? Have you for a long time? Do you know why you write? Do you see yourself in this passage? Feel free to share. (I’m going to share the thoughts I’ve been collecting next week.)
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| Everyone stopped to take pics of this fabulous rainbow yesterday. |
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| No impatiens in Ohio this year–they all got killed by a fungus last year. But somehow found this one single flower in my garden! |
Crawling Inside Your Characters’ Heads: from Robert McKee’s Story
Hi Everyone!
The kids are back in school and my house is SILENT…except for the soft snores of my pooch who is passed out on her back with her legs up in the air.
I’m reading the classic screenwriting book Story by Robert McKee and I wanted to share one little tidbit that may help you to crawl into your characters’ heads and extract the perfect essence of truth and honesty that we strive every day to find to make our characters come alive.
As writers, we seek to put truth on the page. Meaning we want our characters to act honestly, in ways that only they can act. We don’t want to create cliche. We don’t want to moralize. We don’t want to write over-the-top unbelievable characters.
So how do you write an honest, breathing character that makes your reader laugh, cry, and get moody and unhappy when they are unhappy?
The answer is partially–do they make YOU laugh, cry, and feel miserable (and I’m not talking about just when the writing’s going badly!)
Have you done that–gotten nervous, laughed, cried, started sweating, gotten pains in your stomach when you are writing a scene? Or even long after you’re done writing a scene?
Well, if you haven’t, maybe Robert McKee can help you out.
McKee says that we must write from the inside out–meaning that in each scene, we must not be impartial observers of our characters but actually crawl into their heads and experience the scene from their point of view.
How to do this?
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| Flowers that finally recovered from the torrential rains this summer and are blooming like crazy now! |
Well, here’s how he says NOT to do this:
–Don’t ask, “How should my character take this action?”–that leads to moralizing.
–Don’t ask, “How might someone do this?”–that leads to writing cute and clever but dishonestly.
–Don’t ask, “If my character were in these circumstances, what would she do?”–that puts you at a distance from the character’s emotions, makes you guess at them, and leads to cliche
–Don’t ask, “If I were there, what would I do?”–guess what, no one cares what you would do. They care about your character (or that’s the point–you want them to!)
So what should you ask? McKee says “If I were this character in these circumstances what would I do?
(italics mine)
And here’s his grand explanation:
“Writers are improvisationalists who perform sitting at their word processors, pacing their rooms, acting all their characters: man, woman, child, monster. We act in our imaginations until honest, character-specific emotions flow in our blood. When a scene is emotionally meaningful to us, we can trust that it’ll be meaningful to the audience. By creating work that moves us, we move them.”
From Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee, Regan Books, 1998, pages 153-154
Want to Make a Scene? Join me as I blog at Romance U Today!
Join me at Romance U. today as I virtual-lecture about jam-packing your scenes with good stuff to make them work as hard as they possibly can. Here’s the link:
See you all over there! And hey–it’s Friday! Stop by and say hey! Woo hoo!!!
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| The Lowcountry in late afternoon. That little speck between the trees is one of my kids on a paddle board! |
RWA Conference Highlights: A Tale Told in Pictures by Miranda Liasson
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| Our table at the RITA/GH ceremony included my friends and chapter mates GH Paranormal winner AE Jones and Barb Heintz. |
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| My manuscript that won the Golden Heart in the Contemporary Series category. |
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| AE Jones won the Golden Heart for Paranormal! We are amazed! |
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| We got to pose for a pic with our table mates Sarah MacLean and Eloisa James, who won RITA’s. Unreal! |
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| Gail Hart, my agent sister, who was a GH finalist in Contemporary Series. |
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| My chaptermates from Northeast Ohio RWA. Cleveland Rocks Romance! |
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| Me after the ceremony with GH finalists Nan Dixon, Paranormal GH winner AE Jones, and GH finalist Gail Hart. |
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| Tired but happy friends Barb Heintz, me, Dyanne Conner, and Diane Rippin. |
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| GH Winner AE Jones on the jumbotron. |
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| Distinguished Chaptermate Donna MacMeans receiving her RWA Service Award. |
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| Nora Roberts spoke at The Golden Network retreat. Totally awesome. |
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| The Great Susan Elizabeth Phillips graciously took a pic with me. Clearly we both have extraordinary taste in color. |
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| Still tired and still happy! |
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| Fish at the Atlanta Aquarium. |
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| Downtown Atlanta at dusk. |