When you’re depleted, the need to keep producing work can feel like adding insult to injury… at least to me. As I dragged myself through the second half of last year into the first half of this one, I knew I was too exhausted to do anything but rest, but I knew at the same time that I needed to keep moving. How else do you build a career but by creating the next project and the next one?

That’s a layer of this writing life that I have not untangled. With novels taking so much out of me, how do I work on the next project? The answer for me is in a scattered fashion, when the energy comes. Over the last year, in between novel drafts, I wrote:

• two picture book manuscripts

• an outline for a new novel!

• a concept for another anthology

And guess how much energy I’ve had to commit to any of them. Lol.

The picture book, I’ve been working on with my agent. They are the perfect length for a tired writer—though that doesn’t make them easy. Every piece of writing needs a beating heart, and it’s taking me quite a few drafts to find the heart of mine. Luckily I can put it down and pick it up as I have time and energy to.

I recently stumbled into a solution for my waning energy—well, not a solution, exactly, but rather a support. Griping with a group of writer friends, we dared each other to meet on Zoom on a Sunday morning for a co-writing session. It was during that first session that I did one of the edits on my picture book manuscript. Something about the gathered hearts, something about knowing other pairs of hands are busy, helps me to find a space to do some work—even when I don’t have it in me.

We spend about an hour on writer therapy and checking in on the status of our work. We write offline for an hour, then we circle back to recap. I love it because there’s no pressure to work on anything in particular. I used the most recent sessions to write a creative nonfiction piece that I’m now submitting to a few journals. Each session is an opportunity to continue flowing forward with my writing, while honoring my exhaustion. And, if I’m lucky, I’ll get far enough into a piece that the story will work its hooks into me and I’ll be back in the flow, moving forward and creating freely.

I wish you solutions and/or supports to address your blockages, stoppage, and/or sluggishness.

Onward!

—K.