Process, Part II: Recovering From Finishing
First, a couple things: the Little Prince is bright and perky again. That's the thing with kid stomach bugs–they show up in the middle of the night and are gone pretty much right after dawn, and the kid is all energetic again while the adult feels like she's been hit by a bus. Yesterday was…well, pretty stabby. But he's doing all right.
Plus, I'll be participating in a Book Country Twitter chat tonight. (The hashtag will be #bookcountry.) The topic is: "Author blogs & websites: what works, what doesn't, how to maintain a balance of personal and professional, and how not to become an annoying book marketing machine." I'll be there with Colleen Lindsay and Dan Blank; it promises to be fun.
So. You've made it through the process of writing a novel, and your brain feels like three-day-rotted cheese. What does the recovery process look like?
I should start with the usual disclaimers: YMMV, do not consume if safety seal is tampered with, keep arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. That about covers it.
Here's how recovery works for me:
1. I never want to write again. Yes, I sometimes feel this way. For about ten minutes between actually writing "finis" and sending the "oh God I finished shoot me now" email to my writing partner and agent (and sometimes editor), I seriously question the advisability of ever doing this sort of shit again. The first time this happened it terrified me. I seriously thought I was going to keel over. Writing is so much who I am that the feeling of never wanting to do it again was virtually losing my identity. There was the scary sense of disappearing, falling into a black hole, vanishing. Later I realized the feeling was completely normal–like finishing a run, or muscling my way up a difficult climb, and feeling like I never want to do that shit again either. It's a temporary response to finishing a massive, complex, and draining emotional, mental, and physical task. It never lasts longer than ten-fifteen minutes, and it's part of the reason why I always immediately open up another project and just…look at it for a while. If I'm busy distracting myself, the "ugh, please don't make me do that again" passes far more quickly.
2. Eat something nice, then sleep it off. I tend to finish things late in the afternoon, after a marathon session. After I've looked at a new project and passed through the "OMG do not ever do that again" stage, I usually need something sinful to eat. The last stage of finishing a book is usually pretty lo-cal for me–I will put meals on the table for the kids, but either skip them or pick at them myself. Dinnertime is sacred–it's when the kids and I talk to each other about our day, and they each get a chance to be the centre of attention–so I'll be present at the table, but trying to eat during the very last stage of finishing a book is just not fun. I end up with a handful of trail mix or an energy bar at the computer, sucking down tea or water with lemon while I race to the finish line. So, after I've finished, my body suddenly says, "HEY, REMEMBER ME? FEED ME OR I WILL HURT YOU."
So what do I eat right after finishing a book? I carbo-load. It's pasta-rice-bread time, baybee. I take the kids to a nice Italian place, or we go to my favourite local Indian place and I eat a ton of rice and naan with chana masala or butter chicken. I give myself a complete pass and eat whatever the hell I feel like that evening and the day after. It's not quite a binge–the calorie load, I've noticed, ends up being only slightly higher than my normal eating habits. (Look, I have Food Issues. I track things, okay?) Then, I sleep. The night after finishing a book is pretty much the only time I've never been troubled with "hideous insomnia that takes medication to surmount." (I'm wound kind of tight. But you knew that.) I usually crash early and sleep all the way through until I absolutely have to get up.
If it seems like I'm taking a lot of trouble explaining this, I am, and for good reason. You absolutely must take care of your physical self if you want to write long-term. Writing a 70-100K novel is hard on the fine structures of the hands and arms, and it's terrible for the back. Your body carries you through the writing in more ways than one. Do NOT neglect it. Give it something nice and restorative after you've put it though the marathon.
3. Emotional Whiplash. Writing takes mental and emotional energy, too. It stretches you out like a rubber band, and a project's finish hits me like letting go of that band and getting a nice welt on the wrist. I call it snapback, and the symptoms include restlessness, irritability, mood swings, mental exhaustion, insomnia, the urge to pummel a heavy bag, inability to settle in one place, rabid housecleaning, snarling, and caffeine overdose. The snapback phase can last from a couple days to a week, depending how big the finished project is, how hard and fast I ran to get there, and whether or not I practiced good self-care during the whole thing. One particularly bad snapback took me a month of literally sobbing at the drop of a hat to work out. I cried every. Damn. Day. (At the time I was dealing with finishing a series AND watching my marriage falling apart. Not fun.)
During a snapback, I take it easy. My taste in music generally retreats like a bruised anemone–I want stuff without words. Classical, ambient, stuff I don't have to pick at and tease out the lyrics in. My taste in books sometimes retracts; I used to want easy-reading fiction after finishing a book, but nowadays my inner editor twitches so hard I either want an old favourite or I want very dry nonfiction, nothing else. (If you wonder why I read so much military history, it's partly because I don't read it with an editor's eye.) This is also the stage where I play the most video games. I just want to kill some pixels. Oddly, though, I can't handle television or movies during a snapback phase, unless I get a sudden yen for Monty Python. Even then I'll put it on and sometimes just walk away from it. (Strange are the ways of working writers.)
4. Fill That Well. Right after the snapback, I start this. Any sort of creative effort, as Julia Cameron points out, consumes. You must feed your inner well, or you'll hit burnout. So, I seek out new music, I start wanting songs with words again. My taste in reading broadens back out. I scour the Internet and magazines for visual material. I look at random image feeds. The world takes on new color and weight, and everything I see becomes part of the entity that is the new growing book inside my head. I am normally very interested in everything around me, but my tolerance for stim varies, and during this phase I become well-nigh ravenous for it. This usually coincides with the first few stages of writing a book, but I put it under recovery because it must be managed. It's impossible for me to get to this stage without fully accounting for and taking care of myself during the snapback. Also, the main idea while filling the well is to choose nice nutritious stuff instead of just staring at a few webcomics and calling it good. Museums, libraries, walks around the neighborhood, public places–this is the phase when I watch the most movies, too. My kids love this part; it's where I spend most of my free time during projects.
5. Hitting my stride. At this point, I can say I'm fully recovered–and I am already in the middle of another project. Recovery and work overlap a great deal for me, which is not always the case for writers. I have consciously arranged my work schedule so that I have ample time for the snapback, which is by far the most problematic and vulnerable part of my process. It's all too easy to think I'm through it, try to force the well-filling, and find myself struggling with burnout in the middle of a book I'm under tight deadline for. It's better for me to take two or three days completely off (opening up a trunk novel or a graveyard drabble, staring at it, choking up 200 words or so and calling it good, then taking the kids to the park) and get itchy and uncomfortably eager to dive in than to try to give myself those extra days as a jump into the next project and end up struggling halfway through. Now that I've figured out what I need to recover, the process goes much more smoothly than it did during my first six novels or so.
To give you an idea: my recovery phase after the first book I ever finished? Years. The second, smoke? Six months. The third–a month. After that, it was pretty reliably a month of snapback and struggle before I hit my seventh book and finally learned not to frigging push myself to fully work during the snapback days. Yes, I'm an idiot, it takes beating my head against something for me to figure anything out.
There it is, my recovery process. Yours is going to be different. Part of why I say "finishing requires finishing" is because one has to not only learn how to get from inception to finished zero draft reliably, but one also has to navigate recovery successfully in order to have this writing thing work long-term. Especially if you want a viable long-run career. Do yourself a favor and track your recovery, either with a spreadsheet, index cards, or in your journal. Don't be like me–it only takes finishing two or three books to start noticing a pattern. Hell, you might even find your recovery method/time after your first work (though I doubt it.)
Once you have your recovery pattern mapped out, understand this: It is more efficient to experience each stage fully than it is to try to rush them. Give yourself enough time, and don't scratch at the scab. On the other hand, don't use snapback as an excuse to get out of the habit of writing, either. It's a balance, like so much else. Even something as simple as setting your trusty timer for twenty minutes and poking through your graveyard of unfinished drabbles can keep your writing habit in shape–not race-ready, mind you, but easy to ramp back up when you throw yourself into a new project.
Having fun yet? Stay tuned for Process Part III: Burnout, and How To Deal, probably coming early next week.
Related posts:Process, Part I: Finishing Without Hurting Yourself
Process, Part I
Strangely Cheerful
