Lately, I’ve been wondering if writing (which was always meant to be just a hobby) is taking up too much of my headspace. The wonderful thing about writing is that you don’t have to be in front of a computer or a notebook to work on your book. You can constantly mull over it in your head, fleshing out your plot and rounding out your characters. And usually, that’s great, because you never know when inspiration might strike.
But that’s also the not-so-great part of writing. Your story, your characters, this fictional world you’ve crafted—they can exist in your mind All. The. Time. Until it starts to feel like my books are taking up too much real estate in my head. I’m almost always puzzling out a plot point or trying to think of how I can make the opening line of Chapter 12 just a tad hook-ier. And inevitably, my stories become the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing on my mind before I drift off into sleep. They literally live in my mind rent-free.
Adding to the clutter is the fact that I’m usually working on several books at once. In September, I’ll be revising my second adult novel, revising my children’s novel, working on some marketing and publicity stuff for THE FRAUD SQUAD, and getting ready to draft a new novel. That’s multiple sets of characters, many plotlines, and even more subplots to keep track of. So I’m finding it hard to compartmentalize everything.
And the thing is, this is entirely of my own volition! Well, some of the above are things I’m under contract and on deadline for. But I don’t need to show my editor a first draft of my second adult novel until November. I don’t need to start writing a new novel when I’m already contracted for three books. My editor, my publishing team, and my agent aren’t putting any pressure on me to do anything.
But I want to do all that; all the pressure is very much self-imposed. There’ve been times when I’ve gone for months without writing anything and that’s totally fine; I just wasn’t feeling inspired then. But for the past couple of months, new ideas have sunk their claws into me and I feel like I need to translate them into words now before this creative spirit abandons me. I fully admit that I’m going through a bit of an obsessive phase currently—it’s like how people binge-watch an entire season of a TV show in a day; I feel that same urge to binge, but with my own writing.
Ideally, I should just do everything in moderation: write a little, chill out, rinse and repeat. However, frankly, I just don’t think I’m capable of that. I’m very much an all or nothing, go big or go home person. To safeguard against burning out, I consciously remind myself every once in a while to take a step back from writing and do something else that recharges my creative well. But telling myself to take a break from my own book and go read another book/watch a show so I can get inspiration from it feels like I’m relaxing with a purpose… which kind of defeats the point of relaxing. Everything I do goes back to my books—even when I do something else, it’s always for the sake of gearing myself up to return my focus to writing again.
This is by no means a complaint. I’m not even sure if it’s genuinely a problem that I should be concerned about or if I’m just overthinking. I’ve kind of just made peace with my personality and how deeply I dive into something once it grabs my interest.
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