Opinion: Why Every Indie Author Needs to Take a Break Now and Again

Debbie Young follows her own advice to take a break – pictured in Glencoe, Scotland, earlier this month

Do you find it hard to make yourself take a break from your writing life? Here's the justification you need to take some time out and recharge your creative batteries!

In today's post, Debbie Young, indie author, litfest director and ALLi's Author Advice Center Manager, makes the case for the importance of rest for writers, not only for physical recovery, but also to reinvigorate creative intention and gain perspective.

Whether you're nearing the end of the summer holiday season in the northern hemisphere, or enjoying the first signs of spring in the southern hemisphere, her personal account will give you the excuses you need to start planning your next vacation now!

Indie authors, as their own publishers, are their own bosses.

Most of us are ambitious to write great books and get them into the hands of readers. However much we do, there is always more to do: more writing, more marketing, more admin. A writer's work is never done.

If ever a writer was able to check off every item on their to-do list, I'd question whether they're really a writer at all.

Too Busy to Take a Break?

Whether or not we have a day job, family commitments or other pressures, we pile the work on ourselves, multi-tasking and straining the last drop of creativity out of each day:

• We keep notebooks by our beds for those middle-of-the-night story ideas
• We dictate copy in our cars and on walks
• We get up early/stay up late to squeeze those extra writing hours out of the day
• We eat and drink at our desks (oh, those crumbs in the keyboard!)
• We may even exercise while writing – though so far I've resisted the lure of the treadmill desk!

If we saw a loved one working that hard in their chosen career, would we applaud them, or would we be imploring them to cut themselves some slack? Treat yourself the same way – you deserve it!

Too Old to Take a Break?

Once you reach a certain age, as I have, you may also start to feel additional pressure of “time's winged chariot” (though Andrew Marvell's poem is about a rather different activity), and worry about running out of time altogether (“When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen had gleaned my teeming brain…” – John Keats.)

Theories abound as to how to make the most of each day, how to divide up your time into the most productive chunks, how often to take breaks etc etc.

But I hold that nothing boosts your productivity more than completely downing tools for a week or two, counter-intuitive though that may seem.

Too Broke to Take a Break?

I'm lucky – I'm at that time of life when I can afford family holidays away from home, but you can still take a holiday at home, or rather, based at home, if your budget doesn't run to fancy trips.

The important thing is to STOP – and pause – and rest – and return, revitalised to your writing life, stronger for having left it for a while.

This is how Orna Ross, director of ALLi and author of the Go Creative! series, describes the importance of rest in the indie author's life.

ALLi director Orna Ross prescribes creative rest and play for all creatives

Creative rest and play are not breaks from the process of writing, publishing or business building. They ARE the process.

It happens at two levels. One is the obvious refreshment and restoration we get from taking a break away from the desk. All efforts to to perform, to make, to do draw on a pool of creative energy. Once that energy source is depleted, we become less effective. It’s like drawing water from a well, we need to give it time to fill back up again. But also the subconscious mind is core to the creative process itself, immensely more powerful than our surface, conscious minds. We have our best ideas, our aha moments, our insights and inspirations when we are relaxed, rested, playful.

Orna recommends a mini creative vacation each week, in the form of a “createdate” with yourself – something that I've found to be a really powerful and invigorating tool, even though I don't always manage to fit one in each week. (Here's an account of one I went on earlier this year.)

Practising What I Preach

Easy for me to say, you might be thinking, so here are some examples of what I gained from the two-week break I took earlier this month with my family.

• New perspective on my writing schedule
  After an exhausting thirteen months publishing four novels, I decided to slow up, now that I have a strong start to my catalog of novels. I felt it was important to get the first three in my Sophie Sayers Village Mystery series out quickly, but that's not a sustainable or reasonable pace long-term.
• Revelation about my writing ambitions
  Having established myself as a lighthearted, humorous writer, I realised I do also have within me an ambition to write something more serious that won't be described by reviewers as “a chuckle on every page” or “Miss Marple meets Bridget Jones”, much as I love those accolades.
• Desire to research
  Having dismissed myself tongue-in-cheek as a lazy writer because I'm writing about what I know – English village life – I began to hanker after researching some meaty topics that I could then fictionalise, either within my village mystery series or outside of it.
• New system of time management
  I've designed a new method for managing my varied workload: allocating a name to each day to do with a specific subset of tasks (e.g. Festive Friday for planning festivals and events), and saving up the related work for that day only. However, every day with a “y” in it, I will allow myself to write fiction!
• Stimulating new sights and experiences
  From catching interesting radio programmes on the journey, to finding seaglass on the beach, the fortnight was full of new stimuli for new story ideas, as outlined in the photos below.

Waiting for my family to finish a treetop walk near Ben Nevis (I'm not great with heights!), I realised I need to spend more time in the tranquility of woodlands – great for future createdate ideas

At the Cruachan Visitor Centre, where you can take a trip INSIDE a mountain, we were given a piece of granite as a souvenir – I chose mine for its shape, immediately thinking “The Granite Butterfly – what a great story title!” (Click image for more about Cruachan)

This vintage bear (left), which I've named Galloway, called to me from the window of a charity shop in Dumfries, last home of the poet Robert Burns – I couldn't help but start wondering about his back-story. Small teddy on right is my own since early childhood. Click image for more about the Scottish region of Dumfries and Galloway.

Spotted in the Glencoe Visitor Centre shop, this necklace filled with forget-me-not flowers will serve as a real talisman for when I'm writing about my character Sophie Sayers, who is described as “the girl with forget-me-not eyes”. (Click image for more about Glencoe Visitor Centre).

Whenever we go to a beach, I look out for seaglass. These five different pieces were collected by me and my daughter on the shores of sealochs. Back story ideas again… where did they all come from?

How will your next vacation transform your writing life? You'll never know unless you take it!

OVER TO YOU What have you brought back from your vacation to inspire your writing? Have you ever come to any big post-holiday descisions about your writing? What works best for you – long or short vacations? Any special travel tips for writers? Don't be shy – we'd love to hear your comments!

OTHER POSTS TO HELP YOU TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF
From the ALLI Author Advice Center Archive