#ScribesAndMakers #TTMD @sfwrtr @willelm

How are you trying to keep from burning out in the future? Any tips or tricks to share for others when they get burned out?

My incessant answering prompts on Mastodon surely helps! Especially this one thing I learned here, which reaffirmed something I knew:

Write stories you want to read. For crafters or artists, craft what you want to use (I love what I cook) or paint what's beautiful to you. I love my photos. Be your first audience.

But it's up to you whether you are your only audience. Is that okay for you?

For me, sadly, no. That's why I burnt out. I was failing to communicate. Getting my ideas into other people's heads was very important. Worse, I was writing in the way publishers and my agents insisted I must. It made made my efforts harder and my lack of success more sour.

However, you asked for tips to prevent it:

• I found that writing fan fiction solved my not-communicating problem. I found the right fandom for me and couldn't avoid the feedback. I wasn't writing SF (except in stealth mode), it wasn't commercial, but it did satisfy, and I did communicate with readers.
• Whilst not for me, joining a writer's group does help others. Make sure they understand the Clarion critique ethic where you consider the work and never attack the writer, you give constructive suggestions, and most importantly, only the author gets to decide if the advice is relevant. Keep it social and professional at the same time.
• I stop writing, crafting, painting, whatever, when it isn't fun at some level. I do something else. This goes hand-and-hand with not expecting to make a living doing what I love, which means I can pick it up some another day or another year. If becoming a bestselling author as soon as possible is what drives you, this might not work. Sadly, in my first career, I wanted being an author to be my actual career. Maybe not hard enough.
• I try to recognize whether I'm being too hard on myself. In the realm of art, nothing is the Right Way™. I've seen plenty of artwork that looks unskilled in museums or as wall art. It's the expression and meaning that counts, and being persistent.
• The other part about being too hard on oneself is something I fight daily. Judging my content by the imagined standards of others. I don't know if my stories will offend, for example, and it can be paralyzing and become unbearably uncomfortable. I constantly have to watch myself for that. I practice a zen thing here. I recognize it, ignore it, and simply write anyway. Revision is always an alternative, but I need to complete the story first.

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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Update. From a _Nature_ editorial.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00891-w

"It’s no secret that women’s participation in research is not reflected in the literature on a par with men’s, and that other #gender identities are all but invisible. The gap is particularly wide in some disciplines, notably the physical sciences…as well as at more-senior levels. But are some fields making more progress than others? If so, what can be learnt from them…? These are some of the questions that reporters and data analysts from Nature Index set out to investigate in their project, Nature Index Author Gender Ratio, launched in 2024. This week, they report some early results."