Burnout

I wasn’t going to blog for a while but something came up that made me think about burnout. Now don’t worry. I’m not burning out. I got the t-shirt a while ago, though, but have since binned it.

What is burnout? Is it a taboo? How does one deal with it in real life? Ok, there are articles and such, but how about looking at it from the writer’s perspective. Not a writer burning out, but writer’s tools.

Interestingly, according to the Wikipedia article on Burnout, the term stemmed from a writer: Graham Greene’s A Burnt-out Case. So maybe writers have something to add to the discussion.

First, accept your vulnerability. Writers strip, put themselves out there, and I don’t care if you say you don’t write auto. Something of you is in there. When a reader connects, it’s often with something that touches him/her. We are all somehow I-centred, which is really just being human. Why do we worry? Why do we care? It all relates back to us as human beings.

Taboo? Sure, we don’t want to show any cracks in the armour, especially when we’re on the cusp of maybe “making it”. I guess once we’re there anything goes. Après moi le déluge and all that. But in the meantime…

You find yourself up against a wall. Nowhere to go, just run. But if you run, that’s the end of all you’ve been aiming for, a negation of all your efforts. So how about trying the POV exercise? POV= point of view.

I’m writing Humpty Dumpty’s story from the POV of the egg. I fall. What a mess! But, what if I were to write the story from the point of view of the poor sod who has to clean up the mess? Now that starts getting interesting. Stuff comes into play. Secrets, unknown hitherto. It even gets into politics, finds a new question that intrigues me, gets me going. Hey, I might even change the world. Point is, it gets me going. Gets me out of my egg navel. What I find might even help someone else, and may even do wonders for my reputation.

So, when you’re on that edge where you think you’re burning out, when you think you’re up against a wall, when everything seems way too much to handle, but you can’t afford to lose face, get up there on the ceiling and watch that person struggling below, find ways to help him/her, make that your new story, your new project, and feed it into what you do.

And if it works, hey, it would be great if you shared it.

Onwards, I say, as always.