Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Write-ish, the one-stop shop on your writer journey where we discuss everything writing related from shiny new ideas through publication and marketing.
Speaker: Whether it's on the indie or traditional path and the ish of life that feels and sometimes gets in the way of our creative pursuits.
Speaker: I'm Zara, a self-published author of Young Adult and New Adult Fiction, an alumni of the NYU Masters in Publishing Program, and the founder of Inimitable Books, LLC, a new book publisher dedicated to uplifting marginalized voices without forcing authors to spotlight their trauma.
Speaker: And I'm Kelly, a genre-hopping writer, trier of hobbies, and debuting author this year.
Speaker: My book, Down the Well, comes out in September 2023.
Speaker: Be sure to add it on Goodreads or Zara's favorite alternative, Book Hype.
Speaker: Links will be in the show notes.
Speaker: The name of this episode is called Do Writers Need Breaks?
Speaker: But the description very clearly says that we're talking about burnout because that's really the only reason that I feel like us writers ever take the time to ask ourselves if we need a break.
Speaker: And if you're in denial and don't know what burnout is and feel like you've never experienced it or are just genuinely curious, like, okay, what actually is it?
Speaker: Because I hear the term thrown around.
Speaker: Does it apply to me?
Speaker: Let's talk about what burnout is first.
Speaker: Could you imagine...
Speaker: being in denial thinking you are the one special person who doesn't experience this thing that everyone experiences i can't personally but you know given how people around the world react to science and obvious evidence of certain things i have no doubt that there are people who believe that i've never experienced burnout it's the capital of them talking
Speaker: It's not only I hate my job experience, but short history lesson.
Speaker: The term burnout was actually first printed in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, but that referred to a love petering out.
Speaker: But the first time it was used to describe the psychological phenomenon of burnout.
Speaker: having depleted energy, enjoyment, and patience regarding work and, you know, bleeding over into other areas of life was in 1969 by H.B.
Speaker: Bradley in a criminology paper.
Speaker: And then the first psychologist to use it was Herbert Ferdinberger.
Speaker: I feel like it's always a German psychologist when it comes to stuff that then gets thrown around in pop culture for better of a voice.
Speaker: I'm looking at you, Freud.
Speaker: And Herbert Furnenberger in 1974 defined the symptoms of burnout to also include physical ones like headaches, sleeplessness, quickness to anger, and close thinking.
Speaker: as well as also really resembling depression in the people who had it, which was later corroborated in 2015 when researchers confirmed that there is an overlap between the two.
Speaker: And the main person to like do a lot of work surrounding burnout
Speaker: was Christina Maslick, who in 1981 with Susan E. Jackson published the Maslick Burnout Inventory, MBI, not BMI, which is something very different, to assess if someone was burnt out.
Speaker: Now, if you just heard a bunch of names and years and you're like, I still don't know what that is.
Speaker: In short...
Speaker: Burnout is the sustained exhaustion and eventual decline of mental energy and well-being when the effort put into something isn't justified by the minimal reward that comes out.
Speaker: It often happens in monotonous or stressful jobs, but can happen to anyone who doesn't take the time to recharge.
Speaker: Yeah, it's basically like you're pouring liquid out your glass and then you don't refill your glass.
Speaker: And then you're like, why is there no liquid coming from the glass anymore?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Or maybe even you have like a flimsy paper cup.
Speaker: So the more water you pour it, eventually you're going to break the bottom of it and nothing's going to hold.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: The many joys of juggling all things and somehow feeling like you aren't doing enough.
Speaker: So it's a...
Speaker: this point, it might be time to admit burnout, not defeats, just burnout.
Speaker: Many of us have reached this point in our writing where we need to step away.
Speaker: And not only is that the correct thing to do, but I think that people in creative spaces need to do it more often than what we actually are doing.
Speaker: And it will be better for, you know, your art and your process in the longer run, whenever you take that time away to refill the well, recharge your batteries,
Speaker: and feel like a person again, instead of just a productivity gremlin.
Speaker: Yes, which we do have an episode about the war on perfectionism.
Speaker: And even though we talk a lot about perfectionism in that episode, we also talk a lot about productivity and the pressures to always be producing in that episode.
Speaker: So that will be linked in the show notes.
Speaker: And I'm pretty sure we also kind of talked about how the capitalist society that we live in definitely warps our way of thinking about our value with productivity.
Speaker: But like Zara said, in the show notes, be sure to listen to it.
Speaker: And we know that writers of every caliber hit the stage eventually of burnout and breaks are needed.
Speaker: Let's shift gears and discuss the load that Zara and I have been juggling with the podcast and why we are long overdue for a break somewhere.
Speaker: It's no secret.
Speaker: And it's been in almost every introduction, been brought up in streams and heard from the background.
Speaker: So I don't think it's new when I say that I'm a stay-at-home mom.
Speaker: I'm also a stay-at-home mom that has a chronic condition that limits the amount of items I can mark off my to-do list.
Speaker: So when I'm trying to ration my spoons out, my children will always be getting the bulk of them, whether it's a manageable pain day or a high pain day.
Speaker: The bulk of my energy is always going towards mothering my babies.
Speaker: If you want to know more about the spoon theory, a link to that will also be in the description.
Speaker: So where are my other spoons going or the spoons I have left over?
Speaker: They're mostly going towards writing because after a mother, I am a storyteller, which isn't leaving room open for recordings and script writing for episodes.
Speaker: And, you know, now that I'm a signed author, I got a strap into my professional girly pantsuit and
Speaker: and write with my contracts in mind.
Speaker: And I've signed with a publishing company that I am sure you have all heard of.
Speaker: And if you haven't heard of it, then I will let Zara explain further.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So I feel like we've been talking about it all the time.
Speaker: And seasons four intro talks about it, how you're a debuting author, follow 2023 with your book, Down the Well from Inimitable Books, LLC.
Speaker: And I'm the founder of that company.
Speaker: I started it back in 2022.
Speaker: It feels so weird to say back because you're like, oh, you're only in February of 2023.
Speaker: The company formed in end of April 2022, start of May 2022.
Speaker: And that means it's almost been a year.
Speaker: Almost.
Speaker: And I absolutely love it because, you know, I get to do publishing the way that I think it should be done in a way that's fair to the people working in publishing, the authors and eventual readers.
Speaker: But that was a big leap for me to take.
Speaker: Because in grad school, it was my final project as a theoretical sense.
Speaker: And then after I got out of a super, super toxic work environment, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do.
Speaker: I knew that I wanted to do more things in publishing, but I wasn't sure.
Speaker: And thanks to a lot of encouragement from the AuthorTube community, but especially Kelly, I took the leap to start this company.
Speaker: And I'm so happy I did.
Speaker: But it's a lot of work for one person.
Speaker: Granted, I have the amazing support of the AuthorTube community.
Speaker: I have been so lucky in being able to afford to pay Keelan Rivers, who's an amazing cover designer for the covers of the AuthorTube.
Speaker: books that I've acquired, which happened so much faster than I thought, because I thought who's going to take a chance on a small publishing company with no track run at all.
Speaker: So I really want to thank everyone who's ever donated to the Kofi page for that, or of course, to the authors who gave me the trust to usher their debut books into the world.
Speaker: But with all of that support, I am still essentially doing
Speaker: everything but the cover design because I'm doing the editing, the proofreading, the formatting and the marketing.
Speaker: It's not that I'm coming up with all the ideas myself.
Speaker: So I'm not making my authors pay for the marketing, which still means that I'm paying for the marketing, which means I need to bust my ass to like make everything work.
Speaker: So that can get exhausting, especially when you also have to consider the timeline because while traditional publishing normally takes two years to publish a book, they have multiple books and they're juggling that and they have teams of people to juggle that.
Speaker: I'm one person with multiple books juggling all of the different timelines at once, overlapping and stacked in a way that even though on the front end, like readers see like, oh, the next book is coming out in three months or six months or whatever.
Speaker: Whereas for me, there isn't any point where I can be like, okay, I finished working on one book.
Speaker: Now I can take a break.
Speaker: I love how you ran through all of that without seemingly taking a breath.
Speaker: And like it was a thank you speech.
Speaker: after getting like a really good award with all of the, thank you to my authors and thank you to anyone who's donated.
Speaker: As you're trying to break down the quote unquote magic of this little thing called running a company from startup.
Speaker: Like I know that I wasn't going to think twice about signing with you because I know when you and I get together,
Speaker: magic happens, lightning happens, and we catch that shit in a bottle and keep it.
Speaker: But I also think it's great, obviously, that there are other authors on board that can see the great potential to being a part of the start of something wonderful.
Speaker: And I'm just glad that, you know, our paths crossed when we did and we hit it off with friendship as, you know, we did and we got this workshop.
Speaker: And I know we joke about me being the unofficial assistant for you in the publishing company.
Speaker: But like, it makes me so happy to be able to see you doing something as your friend that I know you really put a lot of your heart into.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And kind of going back to the misconstrued idea that you can only have burnout if you don't love what you're doing.
Speaker: I love what I'm doing with Inimitable Books.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Kelly loves being a mom.
Speaker: Kelly also loves being a writer and being a writer with a contract.
Speaker: She loves all of these things.
Speaker: I love the publishing company.
Speaker: I love doing the podcast.
Speaker: I love doing my own writing.
Speaker: But even before I had any of the other projects I just talked about, I would get burned out on writing over summer break when I wasn't also squeezing in the fact that I
Speaker: I had school and exams and finals and all that stuff.
Speaker: It's possible to get burnt out on anything.
Speaker: Kelly is the one who suggested something amazing to help us both deal with and hopefully minimize our burnout.
Speaker: The day before this recording, I did nothing all day except read for fun and like veg out.
Speaker: And I really needed that.
Speaker: And I didn't think I needed it to that extent, but I obviously did.
Speaker: And I feel so much better today.
Speaker: Taking care of yourself better doesn't eliminate the possibility for burnout, but we are going to be doing something to hopefully change the schedule and regularity of which Kelly and I will be getting burnt out.
Speaker: It's nice how you said that.
Speaker: I suggested it when I was really like, so this is what I think is best for us.
Speaker: Because this podcast was the start of Zara and I's actual workshop.
Speaker: We had a very good friendship before and we had a lot of fun together.
Speaker: But whenever I pitched this writing podcast idea, Zara was like, I'm about it.
Speaker: Let's do it.
Speaker: And we made it happen.
Speaker: And I am really glad that...
Speaker: Not only did our writing podcast kind of start circulating, but it was so nice to see other author tubers, whether they were really close to us in the community or a little bit more distant on the different branches, branch out and make their own writing podcast.
Speaker: Like there are so many other podcasts as y'all can listen to that are good because while we never let the work ship break the friendship, like any creative work, it is time for us to shelve rightish and walk away for a while.
Speaker: Like Kelly said, we love it.
Speaker: We love having these conversations with each other and putting them out there for people to listen to.
Speaker: Having other people come on and all those interviews we did, that was so much fun.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And this was an amazing vehicle for us to be able to do that and to share some of what I learned from my teachers with the rest of the world and
Speaker: to be able to just sit down and talk with people that we know to talk at length about what we do and like how their approach is different than ours and things like that.
Speaker: Because while we've streamed with a lot of the people that we interviewed on AuthorTube, you know, there's only so much talking you can do before someone in the chat, rightfully so, who showed up for writing sprints, asks you to turn the timer back on so they can get stuff done.
Speaker: And-
Speaker: As much as I love the podcast, the time it takes to edit a single episode is always at least two hours.
Speaker: And it can go up to eight depending on how long the raw recording is.
Speaker: The interview episodes that we've done with people where you might see like, oh, it was an hour in total at the end.
Speaker: That might have taken me eight hours to edit.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: Kelly, good friend that she is, good work partner that she is, was like, Zara's doing way too much on this podcast, especially now that she has a publishing company.
Speaker: You're really close with one person and you can tell they're putting too much on their plate, but they don't see it yet, but you've been around them long enough.
Speaker: And it's so easy for me to be like, Zara's piling on too much.
Speaker: Or like, y'all text me and be like, hey, just want to let you know that you're doing great.
Speaker: And it's like random stuff like that.
Speaker: I think with our friendship that makes it work so well, especially whenever we're working together like this, because our friendship allows, I think, us to be a little bit more compassionate with work stuff and making sure we both are taking care of ourselves by balancing what's on our plate.
Speaker: Yes, absolutely.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Like, I think I've always been used to like pushing myself to the absolute max and maybe masking how exhausted I feel at times.
Speaker: And I think I've made really good friends in the author tube community, you know, like you, but also Regina will regularly message me and be like, Hey, you're doing great.
Speaker: Also, like I'm concerned you're not sleeping.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: Or just read.
Speaker: Like, when was the last time you read for fun that had nothing to do with the manuscript that you've acquired?
Speaker: I was like, that is fun.
Speaker: And you're both like, that's still not the same as relaxing.
Speaker: I think, too, going back to, like, you with the publishing company, I think you are one of those people...
Speaker: that you are like the very best cheerleader when it comes to other people.
Speaker: Cause I know I'm the same fucking way.
Speaker: We both absolutely do as I say, not as I do because we'll text each other and we'll be like, Hey, you're doing so much lately.
Speaker: Then that's amazing.
Speaker: Make sure you make time for yourself.
Speaker: And one of us will shoot back, look in the mirror and we're like, yeah, yeah, we know.
Speaker: I want you listeners to know that even though we do have these other priorities and these other big, exciting projects happening, you know, we still have a lot of ideas for the future because I'm in the mindset that whenever Zara and I get together and bounce ideas around, it's not hard for us to pan up gold.
Speaker: This isn't a final goodbye because I still want to do those ideas.
Speaker: I know Kelly wants to do them.
Speaker: What this episode is really talking about is that it's not always the right time to do all the work all at once or simultaneously or even...
Speaker: If you're telling yourself, oh, I'll work on this project and then this project, that's still a lot if you don't give yourself a break.
Speaker: And we're both the type of people, as you just heard, who like don't really take the time to take breaks for ourselves, even though we're constantly telling other people to.
Speaker: So this is us trying to put our money where our mouths are.
Speaker: We do love the project.
Speaker: We want to do it.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: But if we keep doing it like we are now, we're going to lose our sanity even more than we already have regarding to every other project and area of our life.
Speaker: And that's not fair to us, to the people in our lives, or the other projects we also want to do and need to slash want to prioritize.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So this is just us putting on our professional people pantsuits and really looking at our plates and what we put on it and what we can remove from it and come back to later.
Speaker: Not even just put on the back burner, because we do do that in between recording seasons.
Speaker: For those of you who don't know, we don't record the episodes right before they come out.
Speaker: And even in between that, we are both working crazy hard on the podcast and everything else we've talked about in this episode.
Speaker: We're not doing that anymore because even something on the back burner can boil over.
Speaker: 2023, we are putting ourselves first, our mental health first, and making sure that our goals are smart, which we talked about in a past episode.
Speaker: The setting goals for writers episode.
Speaker: It will be linked in the show notes down below.
Speaker: This is the Rightish Podcast, and we will not be back with another episode next week.
Speaker: But don't forget to follow us on Instagram still.
Speaker: I have the Rightish Podcast on Hive Social and Kofi at Rightish, and catch us on YouTube.
Speaker: Bye.
