Why Time Off From Writing Makes Me Fall Apart | The Brew

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Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night spiraling from the sense that you’re a failure and there isn’t enough time to achieve all your goals as a storyteller?

Well, it does to me – less than it used to, but it still happens. And it happened again this past weekend on my first day “back to work” after my first vacation in more than a year.

Let’s talk about why today, in case it helps articulate or just validate your own experience as an artist who needs to create as much as they need to breathe.

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As for my vacation, it was two weeks long, for context. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law, along with my niece and nephew, came to visit my family here in Australia for their first trip Down Under ever. I thought this would be a good reason to step back from work and focus on some family and mental health time. Also, maybe recharge the creative batteries, so to say.

But at the end of those two weeks, I woke up at 5:30am in the morning, in a kind of panic spiral. Everything I hadn’t been able to work on – my writing work – piled up in my mind. Both the work I’ve been paid to do and the speculative work I’m pursuing, since so much of a screenwriter’s lie is chasing employment rather.

But on top of what I knew I had to do, I suddenly couldn’t stop thinking about everything else I needed to find the time to work on to move this or that facet of my career forward. New project summaries for my UK agent, a short story I’ve been on the edge of finishing for four months, a new short story I’ve been encouraged to write, podcast episodes to edit, podcast sponsorships to pursue, a screenwriting seminar I maybe, probably should organize. This kind of stuff.

Consequently, I never fell back to sleep and the day’s work was tainted by my mental fogginess.

What I’m describing here is anxiety and it’s something a lot of writers I know suffer from regardless of where they are in their careers.

Many of the most successful writers and screenwriters I know have struggled with anxiety for years – most of them being medicated, I think. I can’t say that for sure, because I’ve never taken a survey of all of my friends – but pharmaceuticals and therapy – are far from uncommon in the art life.

In my case, I’m a workaholic with an excess of ambition that’s complicated by my need to help pay for my family’s life – which I’ve discussed a lot at 5AM StoryTalk. Anxiety obviously goes hand in hand with this specific mélange of problems.

But all this said, my problem this past weekend was something else – which I’d probably call the root cause of those other issues.

I need to write because I need to write – to be happy, but also to stay sane.

Maybe you can relate?

Vacations – or “holidays”, if you live outside the US as I do – are difficult as a result. It’s not that I don’t want to take them, but the idea of not writing while on a vacation is…painful.

I don’t mean I want to work through time off, but I need two or three hours of writing every day – every day – to regulate myself. To stay balanced and as relaxed and even content as possible.

I let myself forget this because others, like my wife, want me to “take care of myself.” But in trying to take care of myself, I actually fall apart.

Taking care of my mental health is writing.

It’s not a job to me – even though it pays the bills. It’s the most effective pharmaceutical in the world, as far as I’m concerned.

Yes, you can definitely overdo it – and I have made that mistake a lot in the past couple of years. But avoiding it all together is a recipe for disaster.

It’s like coming off some medications cold turkey. My body rejects what I’m doing and, worse, my brain does. I grow agitated, impatient, and snappy.

When I woke up this past weekend, in a panic, what I think was really happening is my nervous system started panicking after two weeks of what, for me, amounted to dysregulation. It was time to get back to work – and the work suddenly seemed that much more daunting what with everything I’d let myself slip behind on.

Jump into the comments and tell me if I’m alone in feeling this way. Not everyone is going to relate, but I suspect a lot of you will.

No, no, give me two weeks in France, gorged on cheese and wine, but let me spend the first couple hours of every day writing to help me really enjoy every moment of it. Let me purge that manic creative energy in some way or another.

Speaking of which, here’s a photo of my last big trip to France and the garden table where I wrote every morning in Semur-en-Auxois. Weird twist of fate, but my wife and I ended up renting NPR reporter Eleanor Beardsley’s cottage there.

Pure. Heaven.

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As for what else is going on in my life, the last time we chatted, I had wrapped the first draft of my feature spec script.

I was waiting to hear from my wife about it.

She’s a screenwriter, too.

The good news is, she loves it.

I haven’t seen her this enthusiastic about something I’ve written in a long time.

But because of the fact that I swore off most work for two weeks, I haven’t had a chance to address her immediate notes.

I’m going to those this week, then press forward with sharing the project with other readers as I discussed in the last edition of The Brew.

I’m diving back into the second draft of the TV pilot I was commissioned to write, too.

What with the vacation, I didn’t get to watch many films or episodes of TV, but my wife and I did finish Season 1 of “Shrinking” and, Jesus, guys, I now regret I waited so long to start this show.

It’s fucking brilliant.

Characters you want to spend time with, whom you’re genuinely rooting for.

Characters desperately trying to grow and improve themselves and be happy.

Characters trying to be kind in a cynical, broken word.

And Jessica Williams? God, I was a fan before, but wow – series MVP.

We want to rush right into Season 2 here, but I hate doing that because seasons blend into each other. So, we’re going to move on to “The Pitt’s” second season now. The first season was perfect – and I mean that, absolutely perfect. By all accounts I’ve heard, Season 2 is more of the same. It did just receive 25 Emmy nominations. I’ll let you know what I think.

I think that’s it today except for the artist’s quote I like to leave you with, to mull and remember as you pursue your own life in the arts.

This one comes from poet Charles Bukowski. He said:

“Take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning.”

I feel that ever day. I’ve felt it a lot over the last two weeks. So, please, next time I tell you I’m taking a vacation, make sure I swear I won’t stop writing during it.

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