Creatives can suffer from burn-out just as easily as those in any other line of work. Psychologist and author Ellen Bard shares her ideas about what self-care is, why it matters for writers, and how to deal with the obstacles we often face when we think about taking care of ourselves.

How often are you your ‘best self’?

How often are you relaxed, buzzing with creativity, in flow, words of brilliance pouring out of you?

How often are you enthusiastic, energized, and ready to take on the world?

The world moves at a much faster pace than the environment for which humans evolved, and the amount of information and stimuli in our day-to-day keeps on increasing.

In order to juggle the kind of life most indie writers have to – where being creative needs to be balanced with marketing, social media, family, friends, hobbies and perhaps even a full-time or part-time job – we need to invest in regular self-care.

What is self-care?

Self-care itself as a term is somewhat of a buzzword at the moment, but essentially just means taking accountability for your own emotional, mental and physical health.

When we don’t keep up our self-care we can burn out by running on empty for too long, and eventually make ourselves ill. And even if things aren’t as bad as this, by not paying attention to our self-care we can live a diminished life, where a fog of tiredness or exhaustion lies over our activities.

Or we might end up with a life with a level of internal discomfort that tells us something is wrong, without us really understanding how to fix it.

From London to Bangkok

My own journey into writing was sparked by the need for a break from my management consulting job in London, six years ago. I’m a work psychologist and was doing 60 hour weeks every week, and fighting two chronic health conditions.

I realized it was time for a couple of months’ sabbatical. I traveled, ended up in Thailand, discovered I could create a much more flexible if unusual life – and never went back.

Now my life consists of freelance consulting in SE Asia and the Middle East (I’ve worked in twenty countries and counting!), and working as a hybrid author, writing indie fiction (paranormal romance) and non-fiction (personal development) with a publisher.

I’m based in Thailand, travel is a regular part of my life, and I even met a wonderful partner to share my atypical lifestyle with.

As part of that journey, I took accountability for my own wellbeing and explored the area of self-care. I realized I wasn’t alone, as my professional life working with clients showed me many of us live lives where we rarely stop to ask ourselves what we need.

We live on autopilot, perhaps doing similar activities each day, and don’t give ourselves time to check-in with ourselves.

[Note from Joanna: You can also listen to an interview with Ellen on Self Care and Productivity for Authors here.]

A simple but powerful question

I suggest to my clients and readers to start their self-care with a very simple question: What do you need right now?

Sometimes, we need a break. Sometimes, an apple. Sometimes, a nap. Sometimes, a hug.

But whatever the need, if we’re constantly living our lives reactively, in response to others’ demands – the email in your inboxes, the long to-do list, feeding your hungry social media – our deeper needs can go entirely unnoticed.

Get to know yourself

Many writers have rich inner lives, which is a great start for thinking about self-care. The better you know yourself, the easier it is to work out what your self-care might look like.

Because one of the challenges and blessings of the area is that there is no ‘prescribed’ self-care, it’s entirely personal to you.

Draw or print the matrix below. Consider, what people, places, physical things, and activities nourish you, in an emotional, physical and mental sense?

Here are some of mine as examples:

Already this should trigger some ideas about ways in which you could be kinder to yourself.

What are the obstacles to your self-care?

The response to the kind of activity and list above is often a litany of excuses as to why, exactly, you can’t do any of the things in the matrix right now. Money, guilt and time seem to be the three most common.

Money – Self-care doesn’t have to cost a lot. While green smoothies, the latest vitamins on the market and fancy spa days might all be nice, you’ll see many of the things in my matrix above are free or relatively cheap or are based on things I already own. Consider what you already have access to in your life that nourishes you, and add on the more costly self-care as an occasional splash-out.

Guilt – It’s common for people to tell me they couldn’t possibly take the time to spend on themselves, as they have too many things on their list for others. But if we don’t spend at least some of our time taking care of our own needs, and replenishing our energy with self-care, we will run out of energy, and be empty. We’ll be no good to ourselves – or anyone else. It’s a cliche, but we really do need to put our own oxygen mask on first before we attend to others.

Time – Start small. Don’t make self-care another ‘should’ or chore on your list. Make a list of small pleasures, and include some of these in your week, and give yourself permission to enjoy them. Help your subconscious get the message that this is part of taking care of yourself.

Creativity and self-care

I would argue that the expression of creativity is a basic human need, and part of all of us in the same way that hunger, thirst, sex, safety, and love are. Creative activities can be a great way to practice self-care.

They can be a source of relaxation, help us solve problems more effectively, improve relationships and our emotional wellbeing. Workplaces also seek creativity, as people who can do things in novel ways can often do them faster and with less effort.

And of course, for writers, nourishing our creativity is crucial to our profession.

I found The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron, a wonderful experience in creative self-care, in particular, her idea of the Artist’s Date.

For this, we should regularly take ourselves on a ‘date’ to fill our creative well. This means we should do an activity that will sustain our creativity, which can only flourish when we provide it with input and stimulation.

Examples might be:

Going out for an hour in your neighborhood, and taking photos of anything red you see.

Picking up and reading three magazines at random about topics on which you know nothing.

Being a tourist in your own town by doing something from the top 10 activities on Trip Advisor or similar.

Looking at a random Instagram account and making up a comic-book-style story from the last 20 photos

Your Artist’s Date doesn’t have to mean leaving the house, but it should involve spending some time alone, seeking inspiration from things that are new or different for you.

Self-care is a responsible thing to include in your day.

Self-care isn’t a panacea, and neither is it a one-off thing. Just like writing, it’s something that builds over time, that we need to invest in, where many small steps can add up to make a real difference.

But just like writing, we need to start somewhere.

Implementing some of the ideas above won’t make life perfect.

It will give you the opportunity for experiments to be kind to yourself in small and big ways, and to see what works for you – and make your life a little bit better, every day.

What’s your favorite activity for self-care? Ideas from others can often spark new ways of thinking about how we take care of ourselves! Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Ellen Bard is a work psychologist, writer and digital nomad. Her 18 years’ consulting experience helps her bring practical, useful and fun personal improvement ideas to those who are long on interest and short on time.

She’s the author of This Is For You: A Creative Toolkit for Better Self-Care, as well as several paranormal romance novels. She has been featured in a number of high profile publications – including the Huffington Post, The Guardian, BBC Radio 4 and the Financial Times – as a thought leader in productivity, and the challenges of work-life balance in the modern fast-paced, technology-enabled world. She is based in Thailand with her partner.

[Legs on table image courtesy Ales Me and Unsplash. Thailand image courtesy Mathew Schwartz and Unsplash.]

Anyone who's been writing for a while knows the pain of realizing that a plot point doesn't quite work. In this article, Scott Hale explores how these challenges can potentially be turned to the author's advantage.

Writing yourself into a corner. A quick Google search would suggest of all things to do as a writer, this isn’t one of them.

There are countless posts out there about how to get out of the corner, how to avoid it altogether.

Makes sense, right? The corner is a spiderweb, catching well-intentioned characters and plot points like flies in their unseen strands.

Once you hit it, you’re stuck, and you panic, and you try to break free, making a concession here, retracing steps there; losing time, losing patience; losing heart as the tracks you’ve been laying have suddenly derailed what seemed to be such a well-oiled machine.

Sometimes, you have to get out of the corner, go back the way you’d come, because no matter how you price it, your readers aren’t going to buy the wild excuse you’ve come up with later that sleepless night.

But like any rule in writing, sometimes isn’t all the time.

A Story Stick-Up

When faced with a corner, our natural inclination is to turn around, go left where we’d gone right. But who's to say you can’t go over? Under? Who's to say you can’t go through?

Regardless of rigidity, at the end of the day, authors are architects. We place the walls. We draw the lines. Imagination is limitless, so why are we so quick to limit?

Is it because there’s truly no way out? Or is it because the way out is messy, dirty; because it takes the plot to a place you hadn’t intended?

To an annex you never needed, for all your lofty intentions. To a garden you hadn’t realized you’d grown, to see flourish your cultivated cast? To a basement you never knew you had, for all that darkness that’d been creeping outside all that light?

If that is the case, is that really a bad thing?

Readers, especially those of the voracious variety, are clever. Sometimes, their blueprints of our stories are better than our own. They see corners coming and the sharp turns writers take to avoid them.

Of course, such and such were saved before the bomb went off. Of course, the money arrived before the big man with the brass knuckles got down to business. Of course, the star-crossed lovers went cross-eyed and belly-up.

Corners are missed opportunities. Dark intersections, traversable only by sheer will and a pinch of foolishness.

Let’s go back to the spiderweb imagery. What is every strand but a way out? A spider knows where to step to stop from getting stuck. Shouldn’t we?

And if we don’t, if we do get stuck, is that not a good time for a little self-reflection? To figure out an escape plan before the fangs of defeat sink in and send us wheeling down familiar paths?

Sure, we could go the way of the tried and true, but perhaps it’s better we didn’t. It’ll get us somewhere, that’s for sure, but it’s a tourist trap. Familiar, overpriced; unlike the genuine thing that’d come so long before it.

Character Crossroads

Again, authors are architects. Sure, the worlds we build exist along a spectrum on how willing we are to deviate from the blueprints, but at the end of the day, they are more or less within our control.

The characters, however? Not so much. We like to think we’re pulling the strings, but how many times have they surprised you? Said something you weren’t expecting? They take on a life of their own.

And the corners they sometimes get caught up in with the plot, like two foolish teenagers fooling around, parents just around the bend, those are opportunities for them to take charge, to grow dynamically; to really exist outside the constraints of our worlds.

You could say it’s a twist when the author doesn’t take that sharp turn to safety the readers are expecting, but instead, I’d say, “It’s about time.” And you know what? Your characters may thank you for it.

There’s nothing wrong with tropes or clichés. They are what they are for a reason, and when used effectively, they work. They’re familiar, comfortable.

But like any comfort food, they’re best consumed in small doses. Humans are complicated. In novels, they don’t always have to be, but you’d be doing them a disservice breaking them down to only a couple of tangible traits.

That’s where corners come in, and the changes that come with the pressure within them. They will present your characters with decisions they didn’t know they had to make. They will force them to endure things they may or may not be able to endure. They will show them a part of your world that you nor they were even aware of having existed.

Let’s take a broom to all this web imagery. At the end of the day, corners aren’t corners but windows and doorways. Not all of them are open, but your characters have been invited all the same.

Digging Deeper

Writing yourself into a corner, deliberately or not, sounds like a pain, doesn’t it? Being an author is hard enough already.

Think about all the people you’ve told you’re a writer. How many times did they shake their heads, all wide-eyed, and say something to the effect, “You wrote a whole book? While I never…!” This is a tough job, hobby, passion we’ve chosen.

At the end of the day, we want to do it right, which means sometimes, we have to do it wrong.

Challenge your characters. Pressure your plots.

There’s always a way out; and if your exit plan is truly terrible and detrimental to the story, then it’s time to clear the clouds from all that brainstorming and go back to those clearer skies. But if there’s a chance… if there’s a tantalizing sight just beyond that window at the corner’s crease, why not gander awhile? If you’ve seen it, then most likely your readers have as well.

The gears will start turning, starting cranking out what-ifs. Do you really what-ifs in place of what next? No way? Well, I never…? Reading a novel is a commitment. Writing one, even more so.

Despite laborious hours of editing, a novel is a one-and-done kind of deal. Sure, some authors recycle their own plots, and some books are very similar to others, but all the same, in each one, is the opportunity to make it uniquely yours.

And you’re not going to do that if you stick to the straight and narrow the whole time. You got to wonder, and wander, and get caught in that corner. Because when you’re out of options, suddenly you realize how badly you need them.

And all those things you would’ve never considered, there they are. And sometimes, not always, but sometimes, that’s where the true story lies – a scribbled-in annotation at the bottom of the blueprints, visible only in the determined’s dreaming light.

Have you ever written yourself into a corner only to find it revealed interesting new options for your story? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Scott Hale is a social worker and writer living in Ohio. He is the author of The Bones of the Earth series and co-host of the horror movie podcast, Terrorcast. He has finished the sixth and final novel in The Bones of the Earth series, The Eight Apostates. It is due out early 2019.