Reading & Writing Burnout

Posted by David Duhr in ABCs of Writing      34 comments

Jul
25

Discussion questions: Does your working life consist of a lot of reading and writing, and if so, how does that impact your literary life? Do you sometimes find it difficult to read and/or write for pleasure after a long day of doing those things for work? Does technology have a similar impact on your ability to read and write for pleasure? How do we combat these things?

On this recent episode of Yak Babies my personal pals and I talk about how our work lives can interfere with our creative pursuits. Aaron teaches writing at the college level; Brick is a schoolteacher-slash-principal; and I’m a writing coach and editor. All three of us spend our workdays reading, editing, and/or grading words written by others, and a great deal of our attention goes to crafting written responses to that work.

So by the end of the day, reading and/or writing for pleasure can feel not just daunting, but often impossible.

Or, as Aaron says, “There’s only so much bandwidth in your head for dealing with text.”

Does your workday involve a lot of reading and writing? And if so, does that affect your ability to read and/or write for pleasure? How do you combat this? Are you able to compartmentalize? Tell me about it in the comments.

In this episode, Brick puts it well when he talks about the toll that just writing emails can have on his own ability, or available head space, to write at the end of the day: “Because of my role, the words I choose matter a lot, so I can’t just dash off emails,” he says. “They need to be thoughtful and detailed. Most of my communications now involve drafting emails, and when you’re using that skill for much of the day, the fun factor of doing it at home is not the same.”

And Aaron had an interesting thought about reading: “I’m doing so much more reading just in general because I’m on my smartphone … I’m even more text-saturated now than I was before. I feel more burned out with reading now because I’m always reading on my phone, I’m always engaging with text in some way.”

Do you think technology has a similar impact on your ability to write and read for pleasure? Do you spend what you’d consider too much time reading/writing on your smartphone, crafting emails, surfing the internet, etc? Are there any ways in which technology has aided your reading/writing life?

I know some editors who have an opposite reaction to spending all day working with other people’s words; dealing with such output inspires them to create their own. It’s similar to a feeling you may have experienced when after finishing a particularly excellent book, you slam it shut filled with determination to create something of your own with that much power and beauty.

Or you slam it shut determined to give up on writing because you doubt you’ll ever create anything that comes close.

I guess that like with so many of the things we talk about, there are lots of possible answers and viewpoints.

I’m eager to hear yours. Share your thoughts in the comments below.

WriteByNight co-founder David Duhr is fiction editor at the Texas Observer and co-host of the Yak Babies podcast, and has written about books for the Dallas Morning News, Electric Literature, Publishing Perspectives, and others.

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