This episode is for scholarly writers who want tips to overcome overwhelm when they work.
Hi everyone! Today I’m going to talk about something that affects nearly all book writers—and let’s be honest, pretty much all people—at one point or another, and that’s overwhelm.
I’ll be giving you four tips to help you overcome these feelings when they arise so that you can feel calmer and more confident to move forward with your writing.
So, onto overwhelm. You definitely know what I’m talking about.
This was always a tough issue for writers, but it’s gotten a lot worse during this seemingly never-ending pandemic.
This is especially true for women who generally have to give much more of their time and energy to care for their families and their students’ emotional needs.
This leaves them with almost nothing at the end of the day for themselves or their own work.
Overwhelm is not quite the same as burnout, although it’s related.
But for scholarly authors, it’s that feeling like you’re drowning in too many ideas and too much data. You have no clear path forward.
It can make you feel panicked and like time is running out.
And these feelings, which are based in fear, often slow your writing way down or can even cause you to avoid it altogether.
I mean, how many people do you know who put off writing for entire semesters while they’re teaching, thinking that when summer or a research leave comes they will jump right back into it and get so much done?
I know I have!
But then when they finally get to sit down and write, they become so overwhelmed that they accomplish very little despite having all that unstructured time.
Feeling overwhelmed by writing your book is not just an emotional issue, it’s also physical.
It can literally feel like a heavy burden, an actual weight that sits on your shoulders.
It causes you to hunch down into yourself, or on your chest, making your breath shallow. It prevents you from taking in enough oxygen.
Or it can manifest as tension and distress in the pit of your stomach.
For many years I had chronic stomach issues that would flare up in times of acute stress.
This then became a reason why I didn’t have the ability to get my work done.
When you’re feeling overwhelmed, the idea of finishing your manuscript or getting a contract with a press you admire or having your book be published and read by people out in the world can seem like a distant dream.
It’s way too easy to use your writing as an opportunity to harshly judge yourself.
Like maybe you see these as good things that only happen to other people who have their acts together.
You can’t visualize it for yourself.
So, with all of this in mind, I’d like to offer four tips to help you navigate your way out of overwhelm.
Stop spinning your wheels and start moving forward again in a way that feels good—and not like torture.
HERE’S MY 4 TIPS
Tip #1: Think of writing as a mundane, everyday act instead of something unique or special.
The majority of my clients put book writing in a separate category to other types of scholarly writing that they’ve done before, such as journal articles or book chapters for edited volumes.
It’s often not until I point out that they have been putting book writing on a pedestal that they even become aware they’ve been doing this.
And the problem with treating book writing like something really special and different is that then the stakes feel so much higher.
People end up putting incredible pressure on themselves to write amazing, inspiring, yet accessible prose.
They try to create brilliant overarching arguments that blow peoples’ minds.
They want to interweave theory in a way that shows other experts in their fields just how innovative their thinking is.
And they expect this to flow out of them easily and become discouraged and demoralized when that doesn’t happen.
That is a lot of self-inflicted pressure!
And it’s often the thing that stokes things like perfectionism, not being able to let go of your work, and feelings of overwhelm.
So if you identify with what I’m saying, I encourage you to think about what might be possible if you treated writing like a regular, everyday act like exercising.
Exercising is a great analogy because it takes a certain amount of activation energy that can be hard to muster up when things aren’t going well.
But once you get started and establish a good routine, it becomes second nature.
The pressure that many authors put on themselves to write fabulously every time they sit down is like expecting yourself to be able to run a marathon when you’re used to running 5K races.
This is not to say that you can’t ever run a marathon, but you need to slowly build up to it through practice.
And treating book writing like any other mundane everyday activity can also be helpful in defusing the idea that you have to feel inspired to write.
Just show up and see what unfolds.
Tip #2: You do not have to have it all figured out yet!
A lot of what can make us feel overwhelmed and then slow down our writing is thinking that you have to have your entire book figured out before you write it.
I’d like you to recognize that, like any big endeavor, writing your book is a process.
One that is messy and messy and even more messy… until it’s not.
So expecting yourself to have a really clear overarching argument from the beginning or chapters that all fit together perfectly like a tidy little puzzle is not only unrealistic, it’s setting you up for a very unpleasant experience that you’ll feel a lot of resistance to.
I’m talking to you, perfectionists of the world!
Thinking that you need to have everything figured out ahead of time is a way of trying to control and even micro-manage a process that will develop in surprising and interesting and creative ways if you allowed it to.
So, what if, instead of thinking, “I need to have my book or chapter or argument figured out ahead of time,” you reframed it as “The issue I’m having now will get figured out through the process of writing, and I’m open to seeing what emerges.”
Think about it!
Tip #3: Separate your thoughts about writing from the act of writing itself.
One thing I often say to my clients—and you’ll hear me saying a lot on this podcast—is that writing a book is only half about the how of writing, by which I mean strategies to manage your time and increase your productivity, and the other half is your thoughts about writing.
My goal is to draw more attention to the critical, anxious, and self-sabotaging thoughts that we unconsciously attach to writing, which we are all experts at doing.
Think about how much more writing you’d be able to do if you didn’t have such 26a loud inner critic undermining your confidence!
I’ve created a useful exercise to help you manage your inner critic that is part of a free guide you can download from my website called 4 Steps to Master Your Writing Habits and Publish a Book That Matters.
For now, I’ll say that one thing you can do to separate your thoughts about writing from the writing itself is to jot down all of the critical or self-doubting thoughts that tend to pop up while you’re writing BEFORE you formally start your writing session.
I’m getting this idea from a study of students who were about to take a high-stakes exam which found that those who spent the 10 minutes beforehand writing down all of their fears and anxieties about it did far better than those who were just told to try their best.
Why not do this for the next week before you start writing and see if it helps you feel less overwhelmed?
Tip #4: WORK LESS!
Finally, my last tip may sound very counterintuitive—especially to the workaholics among you—but when you’re feeling like you have too much to do, WORK LESS.
Yes, I said it! Work less. And by that, I mean that you should only write a maximum of three to four hours a day.
So where did I get this idea?
I credit it to a writing coach I hired when I was a grad student struggling with my dissertation.
Even though I was living below the poverty level, I scrounged together every cent I had to hire her for three sessions.
I had collected a massive amount of data over 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in China and had no idea how I was going to turn it all into one coherent document.
So instead of writing, I kept reading and taking notes on anything even tangentially related to my topic and convinced myself that it counted as writing (even though I knew deep down that I was procrastinating).
During our first session, my coach asked me how long I spent writing every day.
My knee-jerk reaction was to say “eight hours” because that’s how long I forced myself to sit at my computer, much of which was spent staring into space, when I wasn’t cleaning my floor.
She saw right through this and said, “I don’t mean the time you spend reading, taking notes, or doing things like writing emails.
If you totaled up how much time you spend just on writing, how much would it be?”
And I admitted to her, totally embarrassed, “maybe three hours.”
To my surprise, she said that was the exact amount I should aim to spend each day if I didn’t want to burn out.
And it was the biggest relief to free myself from the punishing routine I had developed of sitting at my computer all day, which I only did because that’s what other grad students I knew said they were doing.
And if you need more evidence that it’s beneficial to work less, an article that came out in the Washington Post last year says that our ability to focus is limited to only four or five hours a day.
I would argue that it’s even less when it comes to book writing, because it’s such a challenging activity for the brain.
Unless you’re someone who does best with writing in really long chunks of time, like an entire day (which, by the way, is a totally valid way to write if it works for you), you will be better off working a shorter amount of time and then giving yourself permission not to think about it anymore that day.
Better yet, now that summer’s coming and a lot of folks don’t teach during that time, use the rest of your day to do things you want to do.
Like hobbies, rest, rejuvenation, and spending time with loved ones.
You can tell people that your writing coach gave you permission to do this!
So let me sum up these four tips again.
First, treat writing as a mundane, everyday act instead of something unique or special.
Second, stop thinking that you have to have your book all figured out yet.
Third, separate your thoughts & anxieties about writing from the act of writing itself.
And fourth, work fewer hours and truly allow yourself to relax and recuperate.
It’s been a really tough couple of years, and we all need to be giving ourselves more grace and compassion instead of beating ourselves up for not accomplishing more.
And if all else fails, when you’re feeling overwhelmed, I encourage you to just do the next, small step that feels best to you.
Not something you feel like you should do, but something that you want to do.
And that might mean working on your book, or it might mean taking a nap.
I hope that this has been helpful, and I’ll be back next week with more tips on how to write your book with greater ease and joy.
See you next time! Happy writing.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to check out Episode 54: Four Ways to Overcome Writer’s Block!