005: Bad Weeks Happen – On Writing And Resilience

Like many of you, I have good weeks and bad weeks on the writing front. This week has been rocky, and if you’re feeling like things are unsettled and unfocused too, that’s a pretty natural response to this point of the year.

Ordinarily, my response in this newsletter would be offering advice: here’s how to bounce back when life impedes writing. Or I would point out that sometimes a rough writing week is a natural flow-through from good things, and you’re just figuring out the new normal after a big success.

I had some good news this week—I’m officially Doctor Peter M. Ball now, with a degree to frame and put on my wall. It’s big news, but also…confronting. This was my second attempt at getting a PhD, and being a student has been part of my self-image for a long time. 

Now, that phase of my life is over. I’m not the student anymore. I have to redefine myself and what I do. All the things I’ve been putting off “until the PhD is over” now have to be done. 

The narrative I’m telling myself no longer fits the vision of what I should do, and so I’m flailing a little. Course-correcting my internal narrative isn’t as easy as I’d like. 

And here’s the important bit: that’s how it goes, sometimes. 

WRITING AND RESILIENCE

I’m always fascinated by psychologies framing of resilience, which represents our emotional and mental ability to respond to a crisis, then return to a pre-crisis state. 

A litany of factors influenced your resilience, from internal aspects such as your self-esteem, ability to self-regulate, and utilise a positive outlook, through to external factors such as support systems and access to opportunities and resources. 

Writers need a fair amount of resilience. There’s a certain ego inherent to writing—to putting things on a page and thinking people will want to read it—but it’s also a career where there are remarkably few things you can control and a lot of rejection and uncertainty.

Worse, it’s a job where cash flow is uneven, where the rewards for hard work are received in a distant, hypothetical future. A job where even the people closest to you can see your writing as something slightly frivolous and easily set-aside.

Writers, by nature, have to be resilient, but it doesn’t take much to overwhelm your baseline toolkit for maintaining that resiliency. Often, all it takes is one or two additional stressors to push you into the zone where you can’t just bounce back.

I’m currently three major stressors into the red-zone, on top of a small pile of stuff I was dealing with prior to this week, so I’ve been having days where the easiest solution is burn your entire career down and start from scratch.

Not the best solution, but that’s the thing about stressors overwhelm your resilience: you stop thinking proactively and start reacting, and your reactions are rarely the logical choice.

THE URGE TO DO MORE

The problem with being overwhelmed is that the obvious solution is to just do more until you catch up. 

I’ve been writing for a living for twenty-plus years now. This isn’t my first go-around with overwhelm, and I for years my default response was jamming my foot against the accelerator and trying to do more until metastasized into burnout, anxiety, and depression. 

Even this week, watching the stressors mount up, my first instinct was to try and write more. “All this would be solved if I just wrote 915,000 words a year! That’s just 2500 words a day! That’s how Stephen King built his career.”

And it is. But when you look at the habits that bolstered that approach—including his alcoholism—and the support system he built up, his situation isn’t my situation. 

It’s probably not yours either. 

And, of course, a certain amount of success and the financial freedom it affords makes it easier to hit that regular word count.

It’s not impossible to write 2,500 words a day without those things, nor is it necessarily easy to do just because you have them, but let’s not pretend they aren’t contributing factors.

SLOW DOWN TO SPEED UP

While my first instinct might be trying to do more, eventually my brain realises what’s happening and switches over to an alternate tactic:

Do less. Slow down. Think about what needs to happen.

I internalised this lesson after reading Dan Charnas’ Work Clean, which asks what people in other professions can learn from chefs and the technique of mise en place. In it, he notes the fundamental irony of speeding up in response to stress:

• You get sloppy
• You miss things
• Your station gets messy and things take you more time, because nothing is where it should be.
• Soon meals get  sent back and you have to remake them, putting you further in the weeds.

From this perspective, the trick to doing more is slowing down and working clean. Implementing precision and making the right choices, following through on the next steps instead of leaving things half-done.

I recommend Work Clean to every writer I know because there’s so many similarities between kitchens and creative work: like writers, chefs have to get the meal out in order to get paid. Careers are built on buzz and being good at that they do.

Building systems and mindsets to facilitate this is central to what we do.

This is backed up by all manner of psychological advice, too. When you feel overwhelmed, the most valuable thing you can do is breathe deep, step away from the chaos, and give yourself space to think what could happen next? 

Rather than focusing on the options that are closed to you, because there are now more taxes on your attention than you can handle, you can choose to delay or defer some tasks. You can deliver a slightly different version of what you intended.

You can choose not to do certain things at all.

There’s a litany of other techniques I can recommend to anyone who is feeling overwhelmed right now. I’ve had to learn to build up resilience the hard way, and the stuff that works for me is a blend of tools from books like Work Clean, doing my time with psychologists, and talking to friends about how they handle things.

But a full write-up of what to do next is beyond my capacity right now. Today is a day for stepping back and doing less, buying myself some space. What I can do is recommend the book that helped me most, and share one of the other perks buying yourself space can deliver.

ESCAPE THE EITHER/OR MINDSET

This wasn’t going to be a long post when I started. After taking a step back and surveying my commitments, figuring out how I could deliver a newsletter this week, my goal was to write an apology email and direct people towards the two GenrePunk Ninja supplemental essays that have gone live on the blog.

I sat down to write just that, and realised that while I couldn’t write the 3,000 word essay I’d originally planned, there was a shorter, more manageable piece of advice I could offer in the time I had available.

I figured it out as I wrote the introduction and adjusted my plans accordingly. 

I adjusted because I had space to think, and realised I had more options than “big newsletter” and “no newsletter”

And I adjusted because once my fingers were on the keyboard, I naturally start thinking about what could happen instead of what I think should happen. 

This is a small but important thing: writing is part of building up my resilience. These newsletters are a designed to help other writers, sure, but they’re also a narrative I’m putting out into the world about my own craft and process. 

Trying to write the essay I meant to write and post here was similarly difficult—I could barely find the time to sit down and put fingers to the keyboard.  

This essay? It’s coming as a surprise, even as I write it. It’s a better fit for where my brain is this week, and helps nudge the story I’m telling myself even as the words come out.

I’m back in a space where I feel like I have emotional, behavioural, and creative flexibility, rather than struggling to fit into the constraints I felt building up around me earlier.

And possibility and flexibility are the wellsprings from which resilience flows. 

WANT MORE GENREPUNK NINJA

This week is a short essay, but if you’re in the mood for more GenrePunk Ninja thoughts on writing, here are three options I haven’t mentioned in the newsletter:

• Bonus Essay 1: On Heinlein’s Habits And the New Pulp Era
• Bonus Essay 2: Here Be Dragons – On Publishing Scams and the Digital Publishing Era

Both essays are available for free on the blog, but they’re long reads. I’ve made low-cost ebook versions available if you’d like to read on your devices instead of your web browser. 

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in my PhD research into series fiction and how it changes the writing process, I’ve published On Writing Series as an ebook with all my PhD research collected into one place. 

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

1. Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.
2. Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.
3. One On One Mentoring: I offer a limited amount of one-on-one mentoring and coaching for writers and publishers, built off two decades of teaching writing and publishing for universities, writers festivals, and non-profit organisations.