Today's guest is Stephanie Marie Thornton, author of A Most Clever Girl, which tells the story of Elizabeth Bentley, a forgotten - and disliked - female spy who spied both for (and against) Russia during the Cold War. Stephanie joined me to talk about the difficulty of creating compassion for Elizabeth on the page, the reasons (some off-base) for her vilification, and why Elizabeth's story needs to be told.
5 Ways to Avoid Burnout as an Author
by Dave Chesson
Maybe it's just me, but sometimes I can't seem to find enough hours in the day to do everything that needs to get done.
In these instances, I often feel exhausted and drained, and don't even want to write even when I have time.
I'm sure you've experienced it: the dreaded burnout. It's a real thing and happens to all of us at some point or another, but as someone who has written thousands of words while also dealing with dyslexia since I was a child, I've come up with a few key tactics to help.
Here are five ways to avoid burnout!
Make Time for Yourself
Don't be afraid to turn off the computer/laptop/tablet etc., close your eyes, and just relax! Take a walk outside if you can, or sit down with a good book.
Additionally, you need to make sure you are taking enough breaks within your day, on your weekend, as well as taking vacations throughout the year.
This, perhaps more than any other tactic on this list, is one of the most important. If you wait until you are burnt out to take a vacation, it will not work as effectively. You need to plan these things ahead in order to gain the most benefit from them.
This is why I recommend scheduling your breaks. Use a Pomodoro timer or something similar during the day to make sure you get enough time to breathe, and make sure that you have time off actually scheduled in your calendar.
Find a system that works for you, and you will not regret it.
Measure Your Progress
One of the best ways to get motivated and stay motivated is to track your progress.
This can be done in a number of ways, from simply writing down how many words you write each day and checking it off as the days go by, or using one of dozens of apps designed for authors available online. You can even use a simple spreadsheet to do this.
I think you will be surprised at how motivated you get just by seeing how far you've come. This is one of the key aspects of motivation: you find it when you see success.
And you can't truly see success, unless you are tracking your progress.
Try Dictation
If you are burnt out, or facing burnout, perhaps you could learn to write smarter instead of harder.
One way to work smarter and therefore write faster, is with dictation.
With a good dictation software like Dragon Home or an equivalent, and with a little practice, you can write a lot more efficiently in the same time it took you to write before.
This doesn't necessarily mean that you should write more. In fact, it might be a better idea to not write more.
Simply write the same amount that you were doing before, and you will find that you do it in far less time, leaving room for you to do other things, not the least of which is tactic #1 above: taking breaks.
I've personally found that dictation has saved me time, which gives me more space to breathe, not to mention saving my fingers and wrists from a little bit of strain.
(I dictated this article by the way.)
Outsource the Tasks You Least Enjoy
If you're like me, one of the biggest reasons for your burnout is that there are simply too many tasks on your list.
But it doesn't have to be this way.
A solution would be to outsource some of these not-so-fun jobs (like bookkeeping) and hire someone else who can do them more efficiently than yourself. This will free up valuable time which you can then use to take breaks or write even faster with that dictation software!
Outsourcing can cost money but keep in mind that your time is valuable. Literally, you can assign a monetary value to your time.
Figure out how much money you make in an hour, then decide how many hours you work to do a certain task, then look at how much it would cost to pay someone else to do that same task. If the cost of outsourcing is less then the hourly cost of you doing it, then maybe it would be a good idea to outsource.
That's not to mention, outsourcing these troublesome tasks can take a load off of your mind, and sometimes that alone can make it worth it.
Follow a Healthy Lifestyle
Lastly, I'd like to talk about one of the most important items on this list that is often overlooked, and that is your health.
I'm not just talking about your mental health, I'm talking about your physical health. The two are inseparably connected.
In my own experience, I found that when I eat better and exercise, my mind is more alert, I have more energy, and I make fewer mistakes.
There is no doubt that burnout is closely associated with physical well-being. To affect one is to affect the other.
Now I'm not a medical professional, and can't give medical advice, but I do recommend that you seek out a personal trainer, a dietitian, or at the very least your primary care doctor to discuss ways in which you can take your health to the next level so you can avoid burnout.
I recommend The Healthy Writer by Joanna Penn and Dr. Euan Lawson, for more on this topic.
Final Thoughts
With so many different tactics to try, it may be difficult to know which one is best for your personal situation.
That’s why I want you to choose the tactic that sounds most appealing and give it a shot.
Whether you use dictation software or hire an editor, any solution is better than feeling burnt out from writing all day, every day.
Dave Chesson is the creator of Kindlepreneur.com, a website devoted to teaching advanced book Marketing which even Amazon KDP acknowledge as one of the best by telling users to “Gain insight from Kindlepreneur on how you can optimize marketing for your books.” Having worked with such authors as Orson Scott Card, Ted Dekker and more, his tactics help both Fiction and Nonfiction authors of all levels get their books discovered by the right readers.
The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature
At age nine Farah Jasmine Griffin opened a gift from her father, a classic volume of Black history, to find this note: “Jazzie read this book. . . . Baby read it until you understand." Shortly afterward he died of a brain hemorrhage, leaving her to seek guidance and solace from the African American novelists, essayists, poets, and musicians he introduced to her as a child. In Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, published September 14 by W.W. Norton, Griffin pays homage to family and community through generations of Black geniuses.
Read Until You Understand is "a talking book, a teaching book, and a treasure," writes poet and essayist Elizabeth Alexander. Griffin applies decades of experience as a professor and scholar in the fields of race, gender, and cultural politics. Her work provides a generous seminar in Black culture, unlocking years of future discoveries for the reader from Toni Morrison to Marvin Gaye. “Our writers and our organizers make poetry of the rage," Griffin writes. "They have been working, building, creating, envisioning, showing us how to live like the future we are hoping to build is already here.”
Read Until You Understand is about your experience of growing up with the canon of Black literature as something of a stand-in for your father after his untimely passing. How did having these strong voices as a presence in your life help you to come to your sense of identity?
Within these pages, I seek to share a series of valuable lessons learned from those who have sought to better a nation that depends upon, and yet too often despises, them. In the process, they have changed the world. Literature by Black writers gave me an expansive sense of self, a sense that I was part of something larger, something that existed beyond my immediate family and community, and it gave me a sense of history. It also imbued me with a sense of possibility.
Upon the election of Barack Obama, some mused that we were living in a post-racial world, while in her book Caste, Isabel Wilkerson instead compares the cultural revival of racism to the Anthrax plague in Siberia in 2016, which occurred during a thaw that re-awoke the long dormant bacteria. How long had you been working on Read Until You Understand, and did any revisions need to occur for the final product to reflect the current situation?
In some ways I'd been working on Read Until You Understand for much of my life, but I started working on it in earnest during the 2016 presidential campaign and finished during the pandemic, the emergence of the global Black Lives Matter movement, and to a lesser degree, the final though contested outcome of the 2020 election. Throughout this time, the stories that I tell, the literature that I share, and the values I explore remain urgent and necessary. The glorious uprising that seeks to advance Black freedom and the outcome of the 2020 election helped to keep the book from ending on a note of absolute despair.
Memoir, history, literature, and art all come into play in Read Until You Understand. Was there ever a point as a scholar that you felt overwhelmed by the sheer scope of your own work?
No. I never felt overwhelmed; I felt gratified to have landed on a project that called for all of these forms and genres. My goal in writing this book is to draw upon a lifetime of reading and almost thirty years of teaching African American literature to explore how, in addition to addressing concerns about democracy, perhaps even more than these, the works also speak to ideas and values that have concerned humanity since the beginning of time. Each chapter addresses a specific body of work and the issues it raises. Although you do not have to have read the books I discuss in order to grasp the lessons I share, I hope my words will entice you to pick up these works and read them. To do so will only enrich your experience, understanding, and life.
Read Until You Understand is a compelling title, as well as a profound statement. Do you believe there is a static point where understanding can occur, or is it a constantly evolving process?
By all means, it is a constantly evolving process. I am guided by the following questions: What might an engagement with literature written by Black Americans teach us about the United States and its quest for democracy? What might it teach us about the fullest blossoming of our own humanity?
This interview contains quotes from Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature (W.W. Norton, 2021) by Farah Jasmine Griffin.