How to Avoid Writing Burnout and Writer's Block

Creativity isn’t an infinite resource. You only get so much of it on any given day. f you push yourself too hard, you will run out of creative energy. You will burn out, and then you’ll lose the ability to produce good work. The dominoes will fall and fall as you gradually lose every iota of your confidence.

Congratulations! You’ve just picked up a nasty case of writer’s block, all because you spent a month pushing yourself too hard. This isn’t the last domino. Nope. Failure begets failure. The more awful work you produce, the less faith you’ll have in your creative abilities.

I once spent <trigger warning> two years with block. I didn’t produce a single poem in all that time. It was terrifying. I thought I’d never produce another worthwhile text. I was through. I was done.

Fuck.

Luckily, that terrifying phase ended, and I’ve produced a book since then.

These days I know how important it is to avoid burnout, so I pace myself in much the same way runners do. Those who are new to the sport walk when they can’t run. Experienced runners measure their energy at every stage of a marathon. I use a similar strategy. I’ve learned that I don’t burn out from writing for eight hours a day. I burn out from writing the same genre eight hours a day, so I’ve separated my writing into a few different categories:

Creative writing (poetry/creative blog posts/copywriting)
Academic writing (technical writing/science/dry information)
Easy writing (magazine features/verse/opinion pieces).

You will not have the same categories. You will almost certainly not file the same genres of writing under an “easy” tag. We’re all different, but these three categories are meaningful to me because I burn out on two of them. I’ve learned that if I do a little of each category every day instead of a lot of one of them, I will avoid burnout—just like magic.

I do what I can to spread out my categories, and it works. It allows me to put in an eight-hour day six days a week without suffering any ill effects. If I suffer from poetry burnout, I can switch to academic work. This way, I’m always producing something, and that prevents me from catastrophisng over my own perceived failure.

Ever used a cheat code? This is my cheat code. It tricks my brain into thinking it’s succeeding despite the fact that it’s suffering from creative burnout. I like cheat codes, especially the ones that work on my brain. I write over 1,600 words every day of my life. Often, I write even more, but I rarely suffer from the kind of catastrophic block that led to my two-year poetry drought.

If you can’t write a poem today, try writing a blog post. If you can’t do that either, try writing some verse. Find a niche your burnout hasn’t touched, and do that.

It works.