Yes, It Is All My Fault!

A couple of days ago in one of these posts, I alluded to the idea that after your crunch month, you might want to consider giving yourself a breather and recovery period before diving back in. Of course, not all authors work like that, and you may be the sort who needs to bull through to the end of the revisions as well before stopping. But THEN, think about a break afterwards, if you’re that sort.

I’ve heard the exercise metaphor used, and it’s a reasonable one. If you try to start working out, but don’t pay attention to your proper form, or where your current limits are at in terms of weight or reps, you’re likely going to strain something–possibly even an injury that will make you stop working out, or severely curtail your range of activities. Be careful of overloading yourself now in your push to write write write, especially if you haven’t been previously “in training” for the event. On the other hand, we’ve all heard the stories of that person who never ran a marathon before, did the minimum prep for it, and had a more or less successful run during the event themselves. Those folk aren’t likely to make first place, but for these participants even getting to the end is a major accomplishment, and participating at all is a success. Several of those types might go on to run more marathons later on.

So, you might ask, why should I be worrying about taking a break at this point? It’s still early in the second week, I need to write! Well sure, but what’s your larger motivation here? If it’s just to get 50K semi-coherent words on the page, you probably don’t have to worry much at all about the quality of the final result. If you run that marathon just to say you can and have, for some folks that’s all they need from the experience. To those people, ignore the sabbatical advice, it’s not likely to be as relevant. But if you want a shiny story you can eventually show around to others, or (gasp) maybe even run another story marathon later, I think it’s better to be examining different angles of how to succeed in that throughout the writing process.

Also, the topic for this post allowed me to include a link from today’s internet salad. It’s another writer’s perspective on the sabbatical and recovery concept. For those of you who enjoy this article, there are many more like it over at Storytellers Unplugged, a shared writer blog with a writing industry-related piece each day and with each contributor responsible for posting on a certain day of the month.

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