Have you ever reached a point in your writing career where you find yourself second-guessing every creative choice you make? Questioning whether you’re good enough to keep trying? Want to print your Manuscript, delete it from your computer, bury yourself in the pages, and set yourself on fire? It feels like an inevitable part of the writing process, and it is!

Often, any artistic development involves two aspects of creative skill: the skill of producing art, and the skill of evaluating art.

Shattered-Earth describes this phenomenon in visual artists, but the same is true for writers! As you develop your skills in producing art, you naturally develop your skills in seeing it, which can sometimes overtake the production skill, resulting in what Shattered-Earth calls the “perceived lack of skill”, which can bruise our ego (an important element in any artist’s toolbox) and cause blocks.

So what do we do about it? Stubbornly force ourself to keep working on our projects until it works? Give up on writing altogether?

When an athlete sustains an injury, they take a break and rest the injured area in order to prevent further injury. And writing is an Olympic sport of the mind and ego, you have to take care of your instrument (It’s you, you’re the instrument).

With the Art Cycle Graphic in mind, you might think that a break is the last thing that you need when your production skill is lower than your evaluation skill, because they need to catch up, right? That can work in the short term. Buckling down and practicing more, banging out words and editing editing editing until your eyes feel ready to fall out can help you surge back into a creative high, but with the natural growth of evaluation that comes from developing creative production skills, you’re setting yourself up to fall back into the cycle and land in an art block again.

So, if you find yourself continually stuck in this cycle, and getting discouraged by it, you might consider a writing break, to recalibrate some of the skills outside of evaluation and production, and get tapped back into Why you wanted to make art in the first place.

When To Take an Art Break:

• You feel really down about your writing/particular projects.
• You just don’t feel like writing like you used to, or you’re stuck in writer’s block.
• Rejection is hitting really hard lately (harsh critique, lack of success in querying/submitting your work, lack of support from people in your life, etc.).
• You finish a big project and just can’t get that spark for the next one.
• If you resonated with the Art Low of the Art Cycle graphic.

Once you decide that a writing break may be a good idea for you to recharge yourself creatively, consider picking a few methods to help you not only take time away from the work of writing, but also help you reconnect with the joy of it.

• Firstly: Take a break from all critical writing exercises having to do with your work. Don’t do rewrites or edits, don’t read feedback, don’t even look at your current projects if you can.
  • Obviously keep up with time sensitive things like responding to queries and meeting deadlines, but try to limit chronic email checking by picking a single time in the day when you check those emails.
• Revisit your favorite stories, the ones that made you want to start writing. How do you see your inspirations reflected in your own work? What about these stories inspire you to make your own art?
• Pull out some old art that you are or were very proud of. Take your favorite color pen and look for all your favorite parts of the piece.
• Talk with a creative friend about the best things about writing. Or, commiserate about the struggles.
• Write a list of all the things that frustrate you about writing, your work, art block, etc. Once you have it all written down, destroy it! Burn it, tear it to pieces, bite the page, feed it to your dog (or a shredder).
• Do some journaling about writing:
  • What are your writing strengths? Pick a minimum of 3 things, and be specific! Find examples in your writing, and highlight your favorite passages.
  • Make a list of your writing successes. Finishing a book, an outline, a short story, a chapter, or even a page is success, when we’re stuck in writer’s block
  • What about your unique viewpoint does your writing add to the world?
  • Why do you write? What is your writer origin story?
  • How would the you that’s just started writing feel about where you are now?
• Do some low-stakes writing, instead of the writing that’s become like work. Write fanfiction of your favorite media (or your own stories!), plan a self-indulgent project with all your favorite elements, even if they don’t usually go together, write a letter from your favorite character to yourself, wax poetic in sappy love letters between your favorite pair of characters, or pen a poem about your writing woes.

If you start to get inspired while on your writing break, whether it’s for your current project or something totally new, indulge it! Don’t feel like that means you have to get back to business immediately, or start turning your new idea into a serious project, just let yourself play around with writing and have fun with it.

Once you start to feel things are looking up for your mood about writing, do a positivity pass re-read of your work! Use some of the methods practiced on your break to appreciate your own skills, recognize your inspirations, and be kinder to yourself about how far you’ve come.

How do you curb creative frustration? Have you taken a writing break before, and if so, what helped you feel creatively full again?

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash