Writer’s Exhaustion, OR, Writer’s Block is Good for You

In 9th grade Social Studies we learned three major things about Japan. First, that Admiral Perry and his U.S. fleet had royally screwed them over. Second, that women were still struggling for respect. Last and most interesting to me, that businessmen in their twenties were dying from overwork. “Karoshi” was sudden stress-related death such as from stroke. The documents claimed it resulted from a mixture of demanding corporate culture and inherited ideas of samurai dedication. Like many teens I was unhealthily cynical and thought the whole thing was both fake and deserved.

I’ve been thinking about karoshi for the last few weeks. My arms are shaking. I have slept about twelve hours in the last four days, and no two of those hours have been in a row. My syndrome-related pain is so acute that I can’t exercise. I can feel the swelling in my lungs and esophagus, the tender heat-like pain when I exhale. I’ve long known that mental stress worsens this syndrome’s severity. But I think, “Have to work through it. I’ve only submitted twenty-one short stories this quarter.” I turned twenty-nine this month and am far from famous. There’s so much work to do.

I have sworn to stop. No more shorts after I reach thirty-five submissions. Four more in this file folder, submit them, and finish. It was “two more” this morning, but I argued myself up.

It’s a vain promise. Rationally, I ought to stop right now. When I open up the vampire story I’ve been wrestling with, I can’t read it. I’ve edited five drafts and seven revisions of those drafts. Now when I look at the page I cannot focus the words into sentences. My vision gets a little fuzzy, and my brain goes right along for the ride. Syntax falls apart and I notice the shaking in my arms gets stronger. Last night I tried to convince myself that shaking was a muscle memory urging me to reach out and type.

This is a fatigue that has not gone away with a little rest; coming back the next day, I find the same problems with my work and my health. Nobody in college told me what this is. I’m calling it writer’s exhaustion. It is a burnout that screws with you on technical writing, in critical thinking, and your whole frame of mind. It’s made me, as best I can tell, incredibly unpleasant to be around. I’m chipper for twenty seconds before this fatigue dries me up and I get snippy; I yelled at someone over how to clean a blender this afternoon. It’s always worse directly after I write. The blender episode was right after finishing a murder scene. I need to do fewer of those.

The worst is that with this intense mental fatigue, I still want to write. I’m rambling this first draft into a tape recorder so I can type it up when I’m more lucid. I’m doing it with no irony whatsoever, which is, I guess, an even greater irony.

In college I struggled with writer’s block. Mine was never a deficiency of ideas. I could come up with a hundred bad ideas before you came up with two good ones. My blockage was perfection. I insisted that every paragraph be pristine on the first draft. The epic novels I wanted to embark upon had to be thoroughly plotted without much notation, since notes were themselves imperfect. I only squeaked out one short story my entire first term, set in a world I spent at least two hundred hours putting together. When the professor asked how much I’d written for this world, looking to indulge in the enthusiasm of a young Fantasy nerd, I admitted, “about thirty.” His frown still haunts me.

The best writing advice I ever got in person was from another professor, Rebecca Godwin. I described my writer’s block to her. This cheery lady was remarkably stoic. She had no sympathy and immediately launched into anecdotes about her time at an ad agency. Perhaps she’d once been like me, but she couldn’t remember if she had. Her department had to produce new material every day and if it sucked then they had to roll with it or they’d be fired. She didn’t say it, but she expressed this thing I carry around: that perfectionism is a luxury.

I had to wade through my own emotional mire. I could advise anyone else through theirs (most of us think we can do that), and I did so for some Freshmen. Nothing you can write will be enjoyed by everyone – not the Bible, not the Constitution, not Shakespeare. I told them they couldn’t aim for it, and they looked at me like a genius. Yet I was deathly afraid of negative reaction. To this day any negative feedback makes me cringe inside, but back then it stayed my hand entirely and pre-emptively. Fear of negative response, fear of incorrect syntax, fear of typos and logical loopholes and saying something somebody else said first (darn you, Yann Martel, for beating me to “fig mints”).

I only overcame these issues after falling on them over and over again. I did public readings to unhappy audiences, and sometimes got them to laugh. I did some performances that would have humiliated me if I hadn’t embraced them (there’s nothing for the ego like stuffing a canteen into your shirt to mimic breasts to play an old crone). I took shallow advice like, “You could be a novelist if you wrote 1,000 words a day,” and did my damnedest to ford the shallow waters, because over time routines erode what prevents them. I added to my novels every day, often with stuff that would only make me laugh, but at least I was getting somewhere. Soon I posted routinely to a blog, and later, posted daily. With hesitation gone, the fountain of a thousand bad ideas got tapped. Bad ideas – ones a literary critic might say were bad, ones my roommate might, or a teacher, or an imaginary cynical teen on a message board somewhere. I waded in that fountain, trying to filter out the ones I genuinely liked despite all the imaginary naysayers I had.

For a while I got a brand new problem: writer’s plenty. I had so many ideas I was afraid to write any of them, because in penning the first I’d forget the second. This silliness cost me months of work and perfectly workable ideas.

One night, when the ideas were so plentiful that I couldn’t focus on the TV, I finally did something about it. I opened a Word file and jotted a couple lines down. Then I opened another, and put down a title. A third, and typed out three lines of dialogue. A fourth, and a fifth, until I had thirty-two documents, exhausting my muse. With every story accounted for by some reminder or placeholder, it became a question of which seemed most attractive. There was no fear an idea would be lost on the hard drive.

Since then I’ve jotted down notes on the black spaces in a program at a play, and on recycling bin paper in waiting rooms, and even the terrible cliché of the backs of envelopes. I have gotten at least ten stories off the white space on envelopes. Have the ideas anywhere, get the kernels out and save them for when the work can be done. Then, of course, make sure you do the work. An easy formula. I whizzed along so much that I ditched word minimums, because I couldn’t keep track of how much work I did throughout the day.

It’s been three or four years of this. That first night ended with shakes of laughter. Tonight it is a medical tremor. I had this condition back then, and back in college, and back in Middle School when I decided I wanted to tell stories. But tonight and for the last week I have been acutely aware that if I do not stop writing, it will stop me.

Writer’s exhaustion. I’ve produced so much that I can’t stop thinking about the work, and at the same time am so burned out that I’m messing it up. I forgot to delete one of the thirty-four occurrences of my name from my Writers of the Future entry, which will cause it to be disqualified. I had been looking over that document for half an hour before I submitted it and did not notice what was right in front of my eyes. It was only last night as I lay in bed that I realized it.

Beyond the typos and brainos, I am getting sicker. There is no day when I do not feel guilt for not writing, even on days when I have high output. I’ll try to unwind and half an hour into a videogame I’ll think how lazy this makes me. How lazy for not writing more, and when I write more, for not writing better, and when I write better, for not having enough published and not being far enough into my career and, at some point, some god whispers about what they do to you first when they want to destroy you.

I can’t help but think of Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk. She felt we put too much stress on our artists as a society, and so wound up with Woolf, Hemingway, Cobain and many others killing themselves. I’m not saying that writing (or writing alone) drove any of these people to suicide, but there is a distinct need for certain artistic people to take perspective and care.

My case is severe, in that my health turns stress into malady. I’m a psychosomatic realist and physiological drama queen. Of course, my case is also very not severe compared to Ms. Woolf going back up the beach for more rocks. But I feel it’s important to express that there is an opposite to writer’s block that is potentially more dangerous and that may lie in wait for a lot of people who are trying blindly to escape it.

I also think about other occupations. The stock broker, the plumber and the cable TV installer have days off. They have their own demands and are all tougher on the body than I could take. But they do not wake up Saturday and fear they’re behind on that novel. Maybe they wake up afraid about car payments or fertility, but those are human regrets a writer also gets. They may anticipate when work resumes, but it has a clear starting and stopping point, so they cannot loathe themselves like this (or at least I hope they don’t). In this vacuum of responsibility, I’ve somehow gotten to the point where most of my waking hours belong to worrying about some kind of story.

At the same time, this is not an addiction. I cringe when writers compare their craft to addiction. A heroin addict shuffles out onto the street to satisfy dependency, perhaps with a glimmer of future pleasure, but he does not feel the obligation I do. I feel obliged to the work, the market I’m going to submit to, and to the audience I’d like to have. It is every bit as conscious as it is unconscious. Somewhere out there is a real writing addict who starves to death rather than leaving her keyboard. The rest of us make decisions.

I love stories, I love telling them, and I love reading the good ones. But I’m making the decision to stop for a while. I hope to only stop for a couple weeks. I doubt I’ll last that long – if you’re reading this, then I not only recorded it, but typed it up. Probably did a few drafts. I’ll lie in bed tonight thinking over the way the shapes of the paragraphs compliment each other.

I hope good sense will get me to take a deep break and that this break will fix things. Not a day off, because you don’t take a day off walking when you break your leg. When it heals, I’ll approach again and monitor myself so that I don’t go too far. I’m pretty sure I know what novel I’ll begin working on next, too. But for now, I’ve had a migraine for at least 36 hours and the sound of a door slamming causes my inner eardrum to spasm like someone is jabbing it with a pipe cleaner. I believe in karoshi.

Please take care of yourselves.


(As pertains to the Bathroom Monologues, they’re going to continue daily. Did you really think you could trust John? He’s written a few weeks of material in advance for this literary vacation. We hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to leave comments or start discussion below - he'd love your feedback.)