On Creative Burn-out: Part IV

From the studio window: Meldon Hill in autumn, beneath a Maxfield Parrish sky

A few more thoughts on creative burn-out and blocks from writers who have walked this path before us:

May Sarton: "When one's not writing poems — and I'm not at the moment — you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach."

Toni Morrison: "When I sit down in order to write, sometimes it's there; sometimes it's not. But that doesn't bother me anymore. I tell my students that there is such a thing as 'writers block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now." 

Agatha Christie gives the opposite advice: "Write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you are writing, and aren't writing particularly well."

Maya Angelou concurs: "What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks 'the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.' And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I'm writing, I write. And then it's as if the muse is convinced that I'm serious and says, 'Okay. Okay. I'll come.'"

And William Faulkner: "I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning."

Of course, there's no right way and wrong of getting through writer's block or creative burn-out. Like everything about the creative process, we each need to find our own natural rhythms and then to shape our lives in order to work with those rhythms and not against them. One last quote, which addresses precisely this subject, from Bernard Malamud:

"If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you."