Artistic Burnout (Repost)

“I’m really kind of over it,” as soon as the words left my mouth, a small part of me wondered how horrible that would actually sound to anyone who was listening to the premier episode of our podcast. How could an author be so sick and tired of writing a novel? Especially the last in a trilogy… is that even a thing? Of course, a quick conversation with a fellow artist quickly proved that it wasn’t just me.

I think it has to do with creativity in general. There’s something about the creative energy that seems to make us get bored with things more easily than other people. It’s probably why teleplay writers (pretty sure that’s what you call people who write t.v. scripts isn’t it?), write multiple television shows at a time. There’s this artistic burnout that you get from doing the same thing day in and day out month after month. It isn’t to say you don’t still love it, but after a certain point it’s almost rather tedious, and at least for me, I don’t like routine. In fact I don’t think I know many artists who do. It’s not in our nature. Writers probably more than any other artists are forced to walk the fine line between multiple worlds, left and right brained, adventurous and needing routine, and of course genius and insanity. We need to balance all of these things in order to function as creative people on the whole.

I think a major part of the reason that book 3 continues to be a royal pain in my ass is because I’ve been writing the trilogy off and on for ten years now. In some form or another I’ve always managed to get at least the first book finished and I had written at least one or two other drafts of book 2 many years ago, but the third book has never actually been finished before now. If I’m going to have any hope of completing it without losing my mind I’m going to have to write some other things in the meantime. I’ve got plenty of other books in the works, so maybe that’s the answer, if Shonda Rhimes can juggle three shows at once, I think I can manage writing two books at once.