A break

Sometimes, when I'm staring at the blank document before me, trying to think about what it is I want to write for that day, and coming up with little to say, I wonder if I should take a break. Not like a ten or twenty minute food break, where I get up and walk around and try not to tax my brain with the efforts of coming up with a new story to tell. But a full break. A day off from telling stories or trying to understand writing and what I love about it and what I hate about it and what may or may not be the right or wrong way to go about it. I've missed a day before and continued, so I know it's possible for me not to lose my way entirely, though I also know from previous experience just how easy it is to let that break continue on and on ad infinitum.

I mean, people do it all the time, right? It's supposed to be healthy for you to take a vacation from your work. And as much as I may love it and try and tell myself otherwise, writing is work for me, and as long as I continue to pursue it, it always will be. That's just how it goes. So surely at some point a vacation is in order, right? I mean, I've done over a hundred of these things, and I ran out of things to write a long time ago, yet I'm still pushing on somehow.

But, setting my own rules, how do I know how long a break is supposed to be? Is it a single day? A weekend? A week? And wouldn't doing so inherently make me fail in my goal of writing everyday for a year? I mean, granted, I already have, but I think anyone would be hard pressed to say that one lost day is better than two, or three, or so on.

When I started this challenge, I knew it was going to be exactly that - a challenge. I wasn't expecting it to be easy. I knew it would be hard, and good god, that hardness has exceeded my expectations. I have pushed hard, harder than I ever had, to write. Somedays it's easier than others, sure, but that's how everything goes. That's how things are supposed to be. At what point can I say I have earned a break?

Everyone has a different answer to that question. And for all I know, it may differ from thing to thing, place to place. Some things may inherently need more breaks than other things. For me, there is no point at which a break has been earned. Not for writing. Even if I were to publish a book, the next day the best thing for me to do would be to sit down and get to work on the next one. I just wouldn't be able to get back to it if I took a day off in between. And, sad as it may seem, I have a feeling that this is true for a lot of people in whatever endeavors they may choose to follow.

Breaks are important, though. We can't burn ourselves out. We need time between the big pushes to cooldown, gather ourselves, and get ready for the next big step. In a way, you could almost say that my real talk posts are my breaks. They don't require a lot of creativity. They're just me getting my thoughts down. Not to say that they aren't useful to me, although they may be useless and uninteresting to any reader I may or may not have. But that's why I wouldn't make a book out of them.

In many ways, you can't take a break from writing. Or at least, I can't. Even if I weren't doing the physical act of writing every day, I would constantly be thinking about it. Thinking about things I want to write, or that I have written, or things that I've read and what I liked or didn't like about them. Writing is, in some ways, one of the most mentally intensive activities I can think of. It always requires your attention, whether you even realize it or not.

So call this kind of writing my break, as an artist may consider a quick sketch a break from their bigger projects. Because breaks are important, even if they do not come in the shapes that we expect of them.