What do you do when “take a break” isn’t the answer? We’ve all ahd that feeling, “I’m just too tired to concentrate.” This can be because you’re worn out from work, or due to chronic fatigue or pain. This week, our hosts talk about working with the brain and body you actually have instead of expecting every writing day to look the same. We explore queuing up tasks for our tired future selves, falling back on craft, using placeholders, and shifting from productivity goals to satisfaction goals. Plus, how to recognize diminishing returns and build systems that help us stop before pushing ourselves into burnout.

Liner Notes: 

Writing Bingo Card Generator 

Homework:

Write down five things: three writing tasks you can do when you’re really tired, and two signs that tell you you’re approaching burnout—including the lies you tell yourself that keep you pushing when you need to stop. Keep the list close at hand and see if it helps when you can’t even.

Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key Points: Too tired? Plan ahead., and do it later. Take a break! Craft: placeholders, lists, iterations. What makes it easier? Challenges, rewards, praise? Lists, smaller pieces? Satisfaction goals! Have fun. Spellcheck madlib. Don’t push to failure. Spotters!

[Season 21, Episode 41]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 41]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Barrier Breaking – Physical Fatigue.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I’m DongWon.

[Erin] I’m Erin.

[Howard] And I’m Howard.

[Howard] And I’m here to talk to you about being so tired you can’t even, can\t even. And what you do in order to can even maybe just a little bit. I’m going to begin by sharing an anecdote I\ve shared in the past. My good friend Dave had a coding technique where in the morning, he would go in and he would look at all the test reports and look at all the project spec documents, and he would sit down then and instead of writing code, he would look at each of the tasks and write down what it was, what libraries needed to be accessed, what code calls likely… And he would stick it to his monitor. And then all morning, when he was fresh, he would work like that and surround his monitor with sticky notes. And then he’d go to lunch, put himself into a predictable food coma, come back to work, sit down at his desk, stare at the monitor and think, “I don’t know who sat here this morning, but they’re really smart.” “I don’t know how any of this works,” and he’d stare at the Post-It notes and he’d pick one up and look at it and he’d think, “Oh, I can do that.”And he\d stick it next to his keyboard. And then he’d just start typing, go get the code library, go get whatever else, finish it and think, “Okay, I did a thing. Ah, there’s more junk on my monitor. What’s this?” “Oh. Oh, I cab do that.” And he would make his way around his monitor. Sometimes he’d finish the day and there were lots of sticky notes left. But he never finished a day without having made a list of things that maybe a future smarter version of himself could come back and fix. And I’ve applied that in my workflows. And now that I have chronic fatigue, I have learned all kinds of things about how important it is to queue up stuff for tired “Howard.”

[Mary Robinette] And I think that’s really an important thing to talk about here is that you are not the same writer every day. And whether you have chronic fatigue or whether you are just dealing with situational fatigue, you’re a different writer every single time you sit down to write. So having a wide variety of tools to acknowledge the brain that you have when you sit down. It’s very easy to have said, “Oh, boy, that was a really great writing day. It’ll always be like this because I’ve figured it out now.” And that’s not the way it works.

[DongWon] Totally. I mean, I’m very guilty of running into these problems. I don’t have chronic fatigue , but I do have “chronic” doing too much. I’m always adding extra projects. I’m always trying to do too many things, fit in too much social stuff, fit in too much travel, all the work, taking on too many projects. I know we’re here spending a week recording Writing Excuses. We do a bunch of these in a row. It’s going to be a very intense week. And in my head, I’m like, “Well, I’m driving back on Sunday. And on Monday, here’s a list of things I gotta get done.” And it’s a very long list of complex tasks that need to be addressed. And I make… I can see myself making the mistake I always make, which is I’m going to be fine. I can push through, I can show up. But you’re right, I’m not going to be the same person I would be if I’d taken a few days to rest beforehand. I don’t know what to do about this because, for me, there’s a lot of pressure to address all the things that are on my list. There’s a lot of things that need to happen and I’m doing too much.

[Erin] This reminds me of, like, what I like to call, like, “four or five A.M. Erin”…

[laughter]

[Erin] Who is usually, like, let’s say, very tired at this point, and there’s a point where  I’m trying to push through getting work done, whatever it is, but I ‘m like falling asleep. I’m extraordinarily slow. The work isn’t that good, but for some reason it’s like I can’t stop, because if I stop, then like I haven’t accomplished the tasks that I wanted to do for the day. So it’s like I have  to push through, push through, push through. And what I’ve found is that, honestly, half the time just saying, “Okay, I’m going to go to sleep for two hours,” and, like, I will wake up, and it will still be very early, 6:00 AM. But in that two hours, I will actually get enough brain cells regenerated that I can actually push through and do this work better. And I will do… In the two hours, if I’d stayed awake, I would have gotten very little low-quality… very little work done and low quality. Yes, those two hours are away, but I needed that to rejuvenate. And it could be two hours, it could be 12 hours, it could be six weeks, whatever it is for you. But I think, we can often, when we’re in the “push through” mindset, believe that we can like out-game fatigue, but fatigue is  physical, and, like, you can’t beat it just by thinking your way through it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. We talk about this in theatre a lot: about the point of diminishing returns. And It’s like I am doing poor quality work slower than if I took a break. And sociologists have studied this for people in the work force: that actually shorter workdays, fewer workdays, you get more work done . But we don’t do that when we’re writing, and there are a lot of times we don\t… we also don’t have a choice sometimes. If you are someone who is dealing with chronic fatigue or any other form of chronic illnesses, you have to be able to push through it. If you’re doing caretaker stuff… if you want to be able to write and do caretaking, a lot of times you do have to be able to push through. I think, the thing I would counsel though, is that if you can take a break, take the break. That’s going to be the best thing for you.

[Howard] I want to offer another example. I love to cook. And the way our kitchen is currently laid out, the… I have to walk around one end of the counter in order to put things away, in order to get things out. And, so, planning for cooking always begins with “mezze-en-place,” always begins with getting all the ingredients, all the tools, all the everything into one spot. But I recognize that when I’m cooking, I’m also making a mess. And somebody\s going to need to clean this up. And doing the dishes is a huge effort. Putting things away is  less of an effort, but it’s still kind of an effort. So while I’m cooking, I’ll think to myself, “Alright, am I done with this spice? I’m done with this spice.” It\s eventually going to need to be carried all the way to the other side of the room, but instead, of doing that, I’m just going to shove it to the far side of the counter. To tell myself, at some point, when you’re on the other side of the counter, maybe just pick this up and put it closer to where it goes. I don’t even need to put it away, I just need to put it closer to where it goes. And I will finish with the cooking project, and I’ve made food for myself that’s delicious. I’m happy. I don’t want to put anything away, but everything is a little bit closer to where it needed to go. And maybe on my next pass through the kitchen, there will be enough of me where I’ll walk in and say, “Oh, those things. I didn’t…” and it’s only three steps. If you have chronic fatigue, you know how expensive three steps can be. But I have the three steps now. I will go ahead and move them. And so, planning to be tired, planning to only have one nerve cell left. Only one firing neuron. And queuing something up so that that one neuron is all that’s required in order to do that one thing, that skill has saved me.

[Erin] That makes me think about, Mary Robinette, what you said about, like, sometimes you can’t take a break. And so, I think it’s figuring out what is your… what is the best condition that you can give for your tired self? Like, what is the thing that works best for you? For me, when I cannot take breaks, I find often that physically standing at the computer… it’s harder to fall asleep when you’re standing. It’s possible, definitely, but it’s harder for me, at least. And so, sometimes I’ll just stand over my keyboard, because I’m like, “Okay, at least this way, like, I will be awake-ish to get this done, and maybe that will get me to, like, the point that I need to get.” And for somebody else, it could be something completely different. But the way I did that was like, when I was really tired, I would be like, “Okay, let me try this.” And this didn’t work. Okay, next time let me try something else. And eventually, you end up sort of figuring out how to game yourself a little bit for the person you at least are in this moment.

[Howard] Hmm, you know what? That queues us up nicely for what I want to discuss after our mid-role break.

]Howard] All right, we’re back. Years ago, Mary Robinette and I were talking about something, and I forget exactly what it is, but we talked about the fact that the inspiration had fled. The brain was just too tired, and we had to fall back on craft. And I want to talk about what that actually means. When your brain is just too tired to be inventive, what does it mean to fall back on craft?

[Mary Robinette] So I do a ton of placeholders, and lists, and iterations. So, I know how a story is built. And so, sometimes it’s like, “Bad thing happens here.” And I can mark that down, and then later I can be like, “All right. Now I can do like a list of 20 possible bad things that can happen.” Sometimes it is, “I can write dialogue today, and description is not in my wheelhouse.” Other days, it’s like I can describe a room, but I’m not going to be able to do any plot. And so, I will use the craft that is available to me that day to do the work that I can do that day, with the energy that I have. And that’s one of the things that, for me, falling back on craft is about. Is that… It’s not I have to write and it all has to be perfect the first time. It’s like, no, on a bad brain day, that\s not how that works.

[Howard] That’s one of the most important things that I need to remember when I’m that tired is good writing is rewriting. And not writing is not good writing. And so, if I’m… if there’s just enough of me to write a few really clumsy, ham-fisted words that kind of say what I was thinking….

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I’ll write a few clumsy, ham-fisted words and come back and rewrite it better later.

[Mary Robinette] I’m… I’ve been… For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been dealing with a lot of fatigue that is largely self-induced because I have to narrate audiobooks, and teach, and supposed to be writing. So, it’s all self-induced. Like, this is a scheduling issue, but I have to work through that scheduling issue. And, so, my work in progress right now has… really bad argument goes here, and one of the lines is, “You suck.” ” No, you suck.” It’s not going to be that later, but it gets me my emotional beats. And it’s the same thing…

[Howard] That’s good enough for a lot of TV scripts.

[Mary Robinette] No. I mean, you know…

[Howard] You could work for the CW.

[Mary Robinette] But it is… I think that if you look at the rest of your… if you look at your non-writing life, the tools that you use in your non-writing life to get work done that you don’t have the energy or don\t want to do, you can apply to your writing life. Like, knowing what makes it easier for you to work., Queuing things up. Is it, like, challenges? Is it rewards? Is it praise? Like, you can queue those things up. Is it making lists? Breaking things into smaller pieces? You can use all of those for writing.

[DongWon] Well, I think one of the toughest things in all of this is shifting expectations. I do not have the same capacity to operate on low sleep that I did when I was in my twenties. I’m in my forties. It is way harder to do that. If I push myself or if I have insomnia, or if I’ve been traveling, it just… I can’t do the things that I used to do. And so my benchmark is still set from when I was twenty-five and could do all the things and operate in certain ways. And now I simply can’t, right? But my brain has been slow to adapt to that, slow to shift my expectations, right?

[Mary Robinette] Wait until you’re in your fifties. You’ll have a great time.

[DongWon] I can’t wait. I can’t wait. But here’s the thing: as your life moves and progresses, these things change. As the structure of your life changes, all of these things.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I’ve realized within the past couple of years was that I… all of the writing advice that I had heard, and much of it that I had regurgitated, was around productivity.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And realizing that there’s a difference between a productivity goal and a satisfaction goal. And that what I’m writing to feel satisfied, to be, like… to create something that makes me happy in some way. And that the productivity goals are in service of the satisfaction goals. So I started doing two things. One was making a list of satisfaction goals that would make me happy before I sat down. So, shifting that expectation. It’s not I’m going to try to do 2,000 words. It’s, like, I’m going to try to get them to kiss today. And then the other thing that I did, and this is just within the last couple of… last month, maybe, maybe two months, I was talking with one of my writing students about the fact that she had forgotten how to have fun with the writing. And I made a bingo card. And when we… this is not going to be your homework, but I’m going to put it in the liner notes. It will generate a new and different bingo card for you every time, which includes things like “open the document” or “a smell,” so you can use it either as, “Hey , I did this thing,” recognizing a thing you did, or you can use it as a series of prompts. But it was just this external reminder of: “We write because it’s fun,” and if you are writing through fatigue and it’s not fun, take a break. If you want to be able to write and it is fun for you and you are fatigued,, that’s when you reach for the tools that we’re talking about.

[Erin] Yeah, and I was actually thinking of a very small version of this, and like ways to put joy I think is the way I’m thinking about it. Ways to put joy in the writing is…. you were talking about placeholders earlier, and a colleague of mine was telling me a very cool thing, which is that you can, in Microsoft Word, make spell check take anything you write and decide… like, spell check basically is like, “hey, you did this very common misspelling; I will correct it with this common spelling.” But you can train it to take any series of things that you write and replace it with whatever you want. So you can be like, every time I write XXXX, it’s going to replace it with “Insert cool place here” and highlight it blue, which is, like, a very fun way if you’re typing things a lot and you know that you’re going to replace them. But a lot of times, I’ll use that to put really fun placeholders in. So, I’ll be like, “a dude,” but when I write “a dude,” it will replace it with like “fun guy,” and then, like, I’n like, “Oh, fun guy,  it’s like mushrooms.” Like, whatever thing it is that I think will make me smile at 4 in the morning when I’m writing it. And then when I go back and look at it, it’s not like, “oh, I failed to put this in,” it’s like, “oh, look at all those silly placeholders that I put in that I get to replace,” and it makes it feel like more like “what do I get to do versus what I have to do.” But that’s also just a really fun thing is to use spell check as a tool that you are putting into the world, versus one that is being imposed upon you.

[Mary Robinette] I love that you just turned your entire manuscript into your own madlib. 

[laughter]

[Howard] I want to take a moment for… only term I can think of right now is a PSA. When we were younger, and I know when I was younger, it was critically important to find out what my limits were and to learn to push past them. And you work out until failure; that was really common. And healthy and helpful for me when I was younger. If you suffer from chronic fatigue, that approach is deadly no matter what age you are, because every time you push to failure, you make the next failure worse. Which is why, when we talk about working through fatigue, if you suffer from diagnosed chronic fatigue, or suspect that it’s actually chronic fatigue… any CFS, do some searching and figure out if this is you. Figure out where the failure point is, and always fall short of that. Never push to failure. I’ve heard  “spoon theory,” described as, oh, no, I’m out of spoons. Chronic fatigue is when the final spoon is attached to the pin of a grenade, and if you use that spoon, you’ve destroyed the next day or the next week.

[DongWon] Well, it’s a really important concept in working out. If you are doing heavy lifting, if you are lifting to failure, it’s really, really important to understand that that is under controlled conditions. You’re doing it very deliberately, very specifically with a very specific form/ And my problem with things like CrossFit, for example, is you’re pushing to failure under uncontrolled conditions, right? And that is what leads to injury. The other thing I’m going to point out is a lot of people like to talk about the brain like it’s a muscle. Like our internal mental energy and fatigue is… has the same kind of adaptability as our physical muscles. This is not true . They are different systems that operate differently. Sometimes that metaphor can be useful, but it can also lead you down very dangerous roads because even if you don’t have chronic fatigue, pushing your mental limits over and over again doesn’t lead to hypertrophy and growth, it leads to burnout , and those are really different things.

[Erin] That is very true, but I will say thinking about gyms and CrossFit and all these things makes me think that it’s really important when you lift heavy, to have a spotter.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think in life it’s good to have spotters as well. People who will recognize when you are burning out, who are not you and can help you, because a lot of times when you’re in the moment, it doesn’t feel like you’re burning out. It feels like I could just push through and use that last spoon. What could happen? And it’s good to have somebody who is able to say, “Okay, this is… like, you’re going too far.” It’s great if you can have that externally. If you don’t have someone externally, sometimes, it’s good to write down, like, a list of, like, lies I tell myself right before I burn out. You know what I mean?

[laughter]

[Erin] So that if you put it on your fridge, so that if you feel yourself telling yourself one of those lies, go, “Oh, wait. Maybe it’s time for me to take a break and see if this is a lie and if I am pushing myself too far.” But like whether you spot yourself by setting up things ahead of time or have somebody else spot you, sometimes it’s hard to get outside of your own head, and it’s good to have a way to do that 

[DongWon] That to me sounds like it ‘s time for a new tattoo. I gotta get that where I can see it.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah, why don’t I listen to those signs?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, one of the most important things I learned was actually how to spot my symptoms before they become a real problem, which is another thing that you can actually do. So the people who have, like, these spradsheets and it’s like, “I do this and it turns green when I hit my threshold goal.” So, I use a thing called pacemaker.press. Love it. Which is probably did learn from you, Erin. But one of the things that I like about it is that no matter what you put in on that day, it gives you confetti and congratulations and it turns green. And the other thing… the extra piece of that is that what I can do is I can look at it and go, “Oh. My actual pace is this.” My actual pace during something like a really busy time, is like 200 words, good day, get anything done. So, instead of saying, “Okay, I’m really going to have to make up for it by writing 10,000 words because I only did 200 the other day,” I can say, “Well, what happens… what does the schedule look like if I write 200 words a day?” If I shift my expectations based on my actual capabilities. And the other thing that it does is that on the days where I do have like 1,500 words, I’m like, “What was different that day? What did I… Was it that I knew where the story was going? Was I not fatigued that day ? Like, what was it? And are those conditions that I can set for myself on another day?

[Howard] I run an app on my phone that monitors my health. I have a Polar always-on heart tracker on my arm. And the app and the service serve to help me see when I’m overdoing it. And I have learned some amazing things. Standing up and giving a presentation, for me, spikes my heart rate hard , and my exertion numbers, according to the budget that the app and  I have decided I have, are… I’m spent for the day. And I  learned that. And now I know that. And now I can plan for that. And I think we’re ready for homework.

[Howard] And the homework is going to tie right into what we’ve been saying. I want you to write down five things. The first three things are things, are writing tasks that you think you can perform when you’re just really tired. When all you’ve got left in you is ten words, if that. What are the ten words you can type? Can you take Erin’s trick and write “dude” and it gets replaced with “fun man with glistening abs” or whatever? Those weren’t Erin’s words. I know, but that’s what I was thinking. So, three things that you can do and two things that you recognize are symptoms in you of when you’re about to burn out, or like, again like Erin said, the lies you tell yourself that are going to make you keep going when you can’t . Write down those five things and just keep them close at hand, and see if they will help you get a little bit done when you can’t even, can’t even.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.