I’m taking a break from working on long form fiction (novels) for a little bit. For the whole next six months. The long and short of it is that I just finished a long, engrossing project and I’m a little burned out. This six months off will allow my current project to ‘breathe” so to speak. Hopefully when I go back to it for a super, final, absolute last read, I’ll have fresh eyes.
I’ve been working on one long form project or another – some failed, some successful, for awhile now. Something close to fifteen years, if it’s possible to believe that. Nights, weekends, holidays, any spare time from my full-time job and parenting, all the time. Even when I wasn’t writing – say after the birth of my children – I felt guilty about not writing. The projects were never far from my mind. I wake up early. I stay up late to finish them.
I only work on one project at a time. This is what drives me to finish a project. Somewhere around the end of the second draft and the beginning of the third, I always start to hate a novel. Loathe it. Doubt its very purpose. That’s when the temptation is high to start another project. When I was young, I learned my lesson - work from beginning to end, first to third draft, no distractions, or it won’t get done.
Right about the time I start to loathe a project, I fall in love with the next project. If only I could finish the old project, the bright new, hot project and I could be together! The closer I get to finished, the more eager I am to start something new. As a result, there haven’t been more than a few days breaks between projects for the last few years.
So I’m trying something really new to me here, by trying to force a rest between projects. Force is the right word. It turns out, however, that thinking about taking a break – planning for it – is worse than the actual break. I’m two weeks in now. For almost a full month before the break, I wavered, I panicked. I compromised, suggesting I could still do some outlining. The last day, I woke up at 5 am to squeeze in a few more pages and found my heart was racing painfully – already pounding as I was waking up from a sudden, deep sleep. For weeks before the break I would debate with myself over its merits during my long commute to work. I remember muttering to myself (yes, I talk aloud in the car alone) that planning for this felt something like being forced to schedule my own lobotomy.
But the time to stop was helped by external events. I had planned for a week of rough camping with my family. No internet, no computers, no novel. I shelved the project and started packing almost without having the time to think too deeply about it. Packing up the kids, getting everything in the car, giving the house a brief clean before departure – this didn’t give me a lot of time to think that I was starting the big break – as I’ve come to think of it.
One of my goals for a week of camping was to teach my oldest son how to ride a bike. I was counting on the calm country roads at the campground to give us room to learn. A few days in, it wasn’t going so well. My son, who is so good at so many things – breathlessly good sometimes – was having a hard time learning to ride. He was embarrassed and sad. “Mom,” he said at last, “I think I’m wasting your time.”
No, I reassured him, he wasn’t. I was on the big break. The only goal I had for the whole week, I told him, was to get him up and riding. We could try a hundred times if he needed. I had the time. He smiled, calmed, reassured. I loved his smile. Isn’t the ability to reassure your children, one of a mother’s best talents? I’m as proud of that as anything else, including my work as a lawyer or my ability to lay down clear sentences on a page.
Whether I was on the big break or not, I would have told him the same thing, of course. What was amazing to me – to my internal thoughts that my children never see or guess - was how sincerely I meant it. I had all the time in the world, only this one task. I felt free. Almost elated, honestly. After all my wavering and worries, it appeared the big break had begun.
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