Writing as a hobby should be exactly that, just a hobby. It
shouldn’t be causing you to stay up late every night of the week, to then write
copious amounts of writing during the day. Obviously, you have to write at
sometime during the 24 hours but when?
Burn out is real and I have been through it myself. I spent
all my spare hours writing, day and night over many years. I was writing books.
I had my own magazine. I had a blog. I was dabbling in TV script writing. I had
writing group I was in charge of. I was also a freelance business writer. 95% was
a referral rate and 5% I had to pitch for one-off jobs to fill any small amount
of the time I had. I had so much writing going on but I also had life going on
as well. I had two young children. I had a part-time job. It was all just going
to come to a crashing end, and it did.
So I took 7 years off. I had moments where I would want to
come back, but I didn’t. Nobody explains burn out. It’s where you literally
just melt. You can’t do anything besides the daily functional routine, such as
work and looking after the family etc.
Burn out didn’t last
7 years, probably six months. My exhaustion was very real. So instead of writing,
I focused on craft starting a year after my I stopped writing. Craft just gave
me something special to look forward to. It started with miniature houses,
because they are so cute. I spent a lot of time crafting miniature houses from
DIY kits. Then I also started paint by numbers and I still have these paintings
around my home.
Then my craft started to open up and expand. Diamond
painting was introduced to me and I got hooked. Diamond painting is just relaxing.
Not like miniature houses where I had to focus on every aspect.
Anyway, I could go on about craft but we are talking about
writing and burn out. So how to avoid burnout with writing?
It’s very easy.
You set boundaries.
I restarted writing and I started very slow because I wanted
to put some heavy boundaries in place.
I started with my hobbies blog, this one in fact. I write
about what I enjoy doing – hobbies. I just posted once a week. And pretty
quickly, I realised I had more topics to write about, so I created a couple
more blogs … about 6.
Because I realised, now, I could make an income from
blogging. So if I was going to try it, I might as well, go a bit bigger and
scale it up to make some extra income.
I then wrote my first eBook. It’s a short one, but it was a
turning point. In my 7 years prior in writing, I wrote and published 11 books.
So… this was a huge step, to say, it’s ok, I am not pushing myself greatly to
the point of burn out. I can manage this at a safe point. Also, I wasn’t
pushing myself to have the eBook by a certain date, it was when I was ready
with editing and creating the cover image etc.
So removing the perfectionism, the desire to complete the
task as quickly as possible to jump to the next task and the overwhelming
amount of writing helps reduce burnout.
I’m still writing but notice, no burn out.
Then I created ten blogs and posted once a week on each
blog. So 20 blog posts I would write every second weekend. Plus, I wanted to
create my eBooks. But one at a time.
I have written eBook ideas down and put them in order of
when to work on each one. One eBook at a time.
My new focus is this blog and writing and publishing eBooks,
but still the same amount of writing as I have been doing of late. 6 blog posts
a week for this blog so 12 a fortnight to write, plus working on my eBooks when
I want to.
Again, no added pressure to myself about when to write, what
to write, how much more I can write. Once I hit the writing limit, then I do
something fun, like craft. And I do see writing as fun, but I also see it as
another way to make passive income, so I do have some seriousness to it and
strategy to help me get there.
So I hope this blog post has helped you with the realities
of pushing yourself too much in writing. I hope you can create your own writing
boundaries.
And remember, when your ideas start to pour in like mine
did, years ago. Sit down, write it down, write the ideas. Set aside some time,
like an hour or two to really explore those ideas and then create a plan to
either not proceed or an action plan to create the idea into reality.
Remember it’s about quality not quantity. But quantity helps
and will come naturally as your writing continues to grow. The writing path you
take is up to you and does take time to explore and work out, which path you
may really want to go down.
#burnout #writing #meltoye
Also if you are a beginner in crocheting, you may appreciate reading my ‘The journey of crocheting for beginners’ ebook by Melanie Toye. You can purchase here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1808619
To see all of my ebooks available for purchase click here: https://melanietoyeshobbies.blogspot.com/p/buy-my-ebooks.html
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