Season 1 Episode 4: How to Start Writing Again After Burnout
Season 1, Episode 4
Recovery from writer burnout looks different depending on how you're wired, which is why "just rest" works for some writers and does nothing for others. Wildscribes recharge the spark through physical, hands-on work before the words come back. LoreKeepers need ritual rather than rest, because the schedule is what removes the decision fatigue draining them. Heartweavers need the cup repaired before it can be filled, which usually means regaining control of their own time. Mythmakers aren't tired at all — they're overbuilding everything except the book.
Show notes:
Most authors who come to me now are four or five years into a burnout. Something happened, they stepped back, and now they want to come back — except the habits that made them successful the first time are exactly the ones they can't sustain anymore. The cup isn't even the same shape.
This episode is about what coming back actually looks like, House by House, and why the standard advice fails at least two of the four.
In this episode:
Why the people around you can be a bigger burnout factor than the work
Writing from an empty cup versus a broken one, and why grief isn't a discipline problem
Wildscribes: charging the spark with your hands, then asking why until something catches
LoreKeepers: why rest does nothing and ritual does everything
Heartweavers: the condition of your cup, and why recovery is really about permission
Mythmakers: burnout that looks like building, and the landing page question
Builders versus connection writers — a split that cuts across the four Houses
Questions Authors Ask About Coming Back
Why can't I write after burnout, even months later?
Because the resistance built up while you were away, and pushing through it now takes more energy than you have. Building that energy back costs energy of its own. It isn't a discipline failure — it's an empty tank plus a steeper hill.
Does resting actually fix writer burnout?
For some writers, no. If your engine runs on ritual, unstructured rest works against your energy cycle: you sleep late, get up whenever, and wonder why nothing is recharging. Setting a schedule and meeting it does more than time off does.
Should I be able to write while my life is falling apart?
Not necessarily, and the shame around that does real damage. Writing is magical when things are in alignment. If you're not the kind of writer who can work with a broken heart, that's information about your wiring, not evidence you're not a real writer.
Why am I building websites instead of writing my book?
That's what burnout looks like for some writers — not exhaustion, but obsession pointed at the wrong target. Overbuilt spreadsheets, onboarding sequences, a fifth landing page. The useful question isn't how to work harder. It's why you turned away from the book.
Transcript — Season 1, Episode 4
Welcome back. Today we're talking about the different ways authors burn out, and let me tell you, we burn out in a lot of different ways.
Writing and the author business aren't any different from anything else — except that too often we're treated as though our author business isn't a business. People on the outside are looking in and asking when you're going to get a real job. Or why you're fighting so hard to spend all your free time on this instead of spending it with them.
A lot of us end up in arguments with partners who are jealous of the attention we give our books.
Here's the thing. When you're publishing and writing books for money, there are five departments every author has to fill. It's a big business. So when someone says oh, you're just self-published, I want to punch them, because they clearly have no idea how hard it is to be an indie author.
That lack of support is one of the biggest facilitators of burnout in the first place. So surround yourself with people who actually support the dream — and who can also tell you when you're pushing yourself into obsession, because some of us absolutely can.
The authors coming to me right now
The ones who need help lately are at the end of a really long burnout. Four, five years. Something big happened, they stepped back, they quit.
Myself included.
Now we're coming back and trying to figure out how to do it the right way — and we find ourselves falling into the old habits. The habits that made us successful, or semi-successful, the last time are the exact ones we can't sustain now.
Because our cup isn't even the same shape anymore. Some of these life events took the cup and broke it.
I've got a couple of authors going through that right now, kicking themselves for not being able to write while they're actively grieving. How can you write from an empty cup? Better question: how do you fill a cup that's shattered, or has no bottom in it? You can't.
That's one of the biggest things I'm seeing. Authors giving themselves a hard time for not writing while their life is a wreck.
Why should you be able to write when your life is a wreck? Writing is amazing and magical when everything's in alignment. If you're not the kind of writer who can work with a figuratively broken heart, don't punish yourself for that.
The stigma, and the moving target
We have a stigma about writing generally, and then about trying to make it a career. You're only successful if you're making some number and doing it full time.
Success in most cases is a part-time gig. Even some of these full-time authors — read between the lines and you'll see how much they're spending on ads and how low the ROI is. Barely making it.
So when we're deciding what to emulate, we need a real picture of what we ourselves can do. Because if the goal is far out of reach, we're not going to make it, and the only thing we accomplish is breaking our own self-trust. Then every time we sit down, we have to overcome ourselves before we get to the words.
And it isn't just that. The act of writing is a particular space. You're sinking into the experience, connecting dots, touching a lot of things at once — because we're at a point in the culture where you can't just tell a story anymore. You have to share an experience.
Back in the day you could tell a story and it was perfect. You could wax poetic. I still love those books. Readers just don't have the attention span for it now.
So the performance level has gone up, on top of the stress, on top of everyday life, on top of losing people and losing homes to fires and all the rest of it. That builds more resistance to the act of writing.
More resistance means you need more energy. And building energy sometimes costs energy.
It's very easy to be one of the many burned-out people. The question is how you come back.
Wildscribes
I had an author come to me, a Wildscribe, and what she'd overcome in the previous few years was incredible. The lows she'd hit, and what it took to be the person on the other end of that phone call.
And she kept saying she felt terrible because she couldn't write.
Baby girl. You have to give yourself the grace to come back from that.
I don't think we do that enough — give ourselves the grace to be people. Part of that is the book mill, which treats us like machines. The only way to be sustainably successful is to produce a lot of books, and then we all cry about AI.
Yes, there are authors using AI to write, and some are doing well, and some of those books are decent. But some of us are writers for a reason, and I think that's going to matter a lot.
So: you're a Wildscribe and you burned out. Life, money, love, grief, or you just worked yourself to the bone. Now you're back and you can't produce any words.
Wildscribes need inspiration to write. Most of them wait for it. You don't have to.
You can charge that spark. Build something. Do things with your hands, because you're kinetic people — you build energy by doing and by making connections.
Then ask yourself why. Take one idea, and you've got plenty, and start asking. Why is this important? Why am I interested? What do I want to see?
Keep digging until something catches. Then write. No form, no expectations, no goals. Freeform.
Because what you're actually doing is reconnecting to yourself.
LoreKeepers
Now, what if you're a LoreKeeper who burned out, or whose heart or soul got broken, and you want to come back?
The LoreKeepers who've come to me say they've been trying to rest — because everyone tells them to rest, take time off, give themselves a break. And they say: I feel like I'm sleeping and nothing's happening. Nothing is recharging.
Your whole engine is built around ritual. And it doesn't have to be a work ritual. It can just be ritual.
If you're letting yourself go to bed late and get up whenever, you're working against your own energy cycle. If you want to feel the spark again, set a schedule and meet it. Then go to bed, get up, and do it again.
That sounds boring. But the ritual takes away the resistance and the irritation of not knowing what's next. It's a form of decision fatigue, I think.
Understand, I'm not a therapist. I haven't formally studied psychology. I've studied personality as a coworker, a friend and a coach. But it really does look like decision fatigue.
Once you're in the ritual, you know what you're doing. You don't necessarily know what it'll look like, but you don't have to decide when to get up — you get up when the alarm goes off. You don't have to decide to put pants on, because you decided that last night. You don't have to decide when to eat, because there's a time.
The ritual pulls decision fatigue out of your whole schedule, and that alone is enough to start slowly building energy again.
Then add writing back in. Not every day — it doesn't have to be daily. It can be every Wednesday. You sit down for an hour and you think about writing. Maybe you brainstorm. Maybe you read in your genre, or read your competitors. That's fine. Maybe you edit something. Maybe you go back to a book you never finished.
But you do it for an hour on Wednesday. It's the act of the ritual that rebuilds the energy.
Heartweavers
My Heartweavers. You're the ones who think you can write your emotions while you're still in the depths of whatever you're living through.
Someone close to you died. You lost the house in a wildfire. A nasty divorce. A kid graduated. You're going through menopause. Big events — and we assume we can work straight through them, because we're the ones who write emotion and we gain energy from experiencing it.
Except that's not quite it. We gain energy from writing the transformation of the emotional experience. And we can only do that when the cup is full.
For whatever reason, Heartweavers have the hardest time keeping their cups full.
I think it's because Heartweavers tend to be caregivers. Not always — LoreKeepers are caregivers too. But Heartweavers overgive. When people around them need something, they overgive, and that's one of the biggest reasons the cup is almost always empty.
And when they try to refill it, they're often made to feel less than. Guilt-tripped into things that drain the cup instead of filling it. They can be gaslit very easily, and I think that's because they're empathic.
I'm going to commit to that. Empathic. I have yet to meet a Heartweaver who isn't. They walk into a room and sense what everyone's feeling, and they take on the weight of it to help the people actually feeling it — which is not super helpful for the Heartweaver in question.
So the thing I keep asking is: what's the condition of your cup?
Is it even capable of holding anything right now? Does it look more like a sieve? Is there a hole in the bottom? Is it in one piece? Is there a lid on it keeping everything out?
What's the status of the cup? How are you actually doing?
When a burned-out Heartweaver comes to me, the first thing I do is get a sense of where they are — relationships, work, kids, home. Just where are they.
And I have to be careful, because I'm not a therapist. I never step into giving advice on how to handle emotions. I'm not certified for that. The only thing I can speak to is how to get them back into the writing arena.
For Heartweavers especially, that's about regaining control of your life. Getting to a point where you no longer have to ask permission, or feel belittled, for doing the thing your heart is calling you to do.
I have the hardest conversations with my Heartweavers. They're also doing a lot of work and coming a long way. And with them especially, as the writing gets healthier, so does the rest of their life.
Mythmakers
Mythmaker burnout looks strange, because Mythmakers generate their own energy. The act of working, building, researching, writing, discovering — all of it creates energy. They can run an almost infinite loop.
So when a Mythmaker comes to me, which is rare, they're not saying they're tired. That's not a thing they'd say.
They say they're having a hard time getting words into the book.
And when I ask what they're doing instead, they're building everything except the chapters.
Their burnout looks like building a pile of things that don't need to be built. Overbuilt websites. Overbuilt spreadsheets. Overbuilt onboarding sequences.
How many landing pages do you actually need? Okay — how many good landing pages do you need? One, at least, and it'd be great if it worked well. That does take a lot: analytics, tweaking, more analytics, more tweaking.
But the Mythmaker in burnout becomes obsessed with the wrong thing. So the work is figuring out why they chose to obsess over that instead of the book, and getting the energy cycle back in balance.
Sometimes all you do is divert their attention and keep asking why. Why did you turn away? Why did you stop? What made this stop being interesting?
Mythmakers aren't what I'd call connection writers — that's Heartweavers and Wildscribes. Mythmakers and LoreKeepers are the builders.
And the thing about Mythmakers specifically is that they need a good foundation so they can keep building on top of it. Sometimes they haven't built enough foundation in the right area to discover what they need when they sit down to write.
Burnout isn't one thing
It isn't just sitting around being tired. It isn't just being unable to write. It isn't just being scattered and unfocused.
Burnout is a lot of different things, and how you handle it depends on who you are and what kind you actually have.
So take a listen, and if this is where you are, say: okay, I'm this type of author, and this is where I start.
If you have questions, let me know. This is something I'm deeply passionate about, and I sincerely want every one of you to be successful.
I'll talk to you later.
