What if this is the Last Book You’ll Ever Write?

By Nick Cross

Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

Not to get too morbid here, but it’s definitely going to happen that you’ll stop writing at some point in the future. Either through disease, or death, or taking up some exciting new hobby like competitive topiary. Would the knowledge that you’re writing your last book help or hinder your current work-in-progress?

Eight years ago, I became convinced that the book I was writing would be my last. My magnum opus. Of course, it didn’t help that I was suffering from a serious mental illness and feared that I might die at any second. Or that I felt my agent at the time was pressuring me to finish the book so we could get it out on submission. Anyhow, I pushed and struggled my way through that novel, with a weird mix of fear, self-hatred and messianic overconfidence.

Photo by Christine Keller on Unsplash

Looking back, I’m not sure how I got through that period. What I really should have done is stop writing and trying to get published, because that was part of the reason why I got sick in the first place. If I’d had more of a flair for the dramatic, perhaps I might have taken my own life after typing THE END. I certainly had plenty of suicidal thoughts to work with. But somehow I clung on, through the disappointment of my agent rejecting the book, through me leaving her and the book failing to find a publisher (thought to be fair, it hardly had a fair shot as I only sent it to three editors).

I was wrong about a lot of things from that period, not least that it would be the last book I’d ever write (I’ve written another four since then). But something has kept pulling my thoughts back to the novel I’d written during that dark time, a feeling of unfinished business. Was it still the masterpiece I’d imagined it to be?

Well, no.

It isn’t bad, actually, but it definitely isn’t world-changing in its current form. They say that you should leave your manuscript in a drawer for as long as you can to get a fresh perspective on it, but I’m not sure they were thinking about eight years! Still, I’d recommend it if you feel you can spare the time. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see now that it’s just a book, something that can be revisited and moulded into a different form. With the guidance of my new (and much nicer) agent, I’m doing just that, rewriting it as a graphic novel. The rewrite is still not an easy process, but at least there’s a lot less drama this time around.

It’s fascinating looking back at my life and work from such a distance, seeing how much my mental state bled into the characters I’d created. The protagonist is burdened by massive guilt and self-loathing, putting himself in dangerous situations in the hope he might be set free by death. Medication to control behaviour is everywhere. Even the overriding concept of the novel is an elaborate metaphor for depression.

Photo by Brandi Redd on Unsplash

If the novel I wrote reflected the man I was then, the new version will surely reflect me now – older, somewhat wiser and definitely more cynical. It’s ironic that we’ve just gone through another period of maximum fear and loathing during lockdown, a period that was not helpful in the least to my creative process, and during which I wrote very little. It’s only since the emergence of a tentative new normal that I’ve been able to start moving forward on the book again, to recognise the kind of persistent, low-level depression many of us have been suffering from in the last few months. And with that realisation comes the uncomfortable truth that I will never be truly free of mental illness, just better able to recognise and control it.

There’s an argument that knowing you were working on your final book wouldn’t change anything, because to write successfully you must pour the whole of yourself into the work, holding nothing back. And while I understand that theory, it also puts a hell of a lot of pressure on you as a writer, denying you the space to experiment and make mistakes. By all means, write your heart out and leave an amazing legacy of work for future generations. But don’t forget to be kind to yourself and others while you’re still here.

Nick.

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Nick Cross is a children's writer/illustrator and Undiscovered Voices winner. He received a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award, for his short story The Last Typewriter.
Nick is also the Blog Network Editor for SCBWI Words & Pictures magazine. His Blog Break column appears fortnightly on W&P.

Are You Burning Out?

By Nick Cross

Photo by pcorreia

As I write this, it’s Wednesday lunchtime, and I’ve just realised that I need to post this blog on Friday. It’s my lunch hour at work, and I’ve spent the morning in meetings, answering emails and interviewing candidates for a job. This afternoon, I have three hours of back-to-back workshops. In the back of my mind, I’m stressing about the fact that I only have a week and a half to finish the illustration package for my novel, so my agent can start submitting to publishers. On top of that, my house is full of plumbers, on an ever-more-expensive quest to work out what is wrong with our central heating system.

I tell you all this not to gain your sympathy, but to point out that my life is quite busy, as I’m sure yours is too! As writers and/or illustrators in the modern world, the majority of us are either freelance or propping up our creative careers with a day job. But because of this, we need to be extra careful to protect our mental health, especially from the dangers of burnout.

What is burnout? My employer, Oxford Dictionaries, defines it as:

Physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress

Which sounds very dramatic. But in actual fact, burnout tends to come on more gradually. This article suggests burnout typically involves:

Emotional exhaustion, cynicism or detachment, and feeling ineffective

For a long time, burnout was a concept more associated with people working in ultra-high stress environments like financial trading. But this year, there have been a number of much-discussed articles about how the modern gig economy affects workers, and particularly millennials. In fact, when I did a Google search for “millennial,” “millennial burnout” was one of the top suggestions.

It was a Buzzfeed article from January that kicked everything off. In it, millennial Anne Helen Petersen talks about how she found herself unexpectedly paralysed by menial tasks, and her disbelief at the idea of burnout – because she was still getting so much done! But this overwork culture (instilled by parents from an early age), is what drives millennials to feel that they are never achieving enough, even though they are working all the time. Sound familiar to anyone?

Photo by Derek Gavey

I myself have struggled with burnout for a long time, though I didn’t know that was what it was until quite recently. It was first triggered about ten years ago when I was working from home, doing a job I hated. Aside from a couple of high-stress conference calls each day, it felt like no-one was monitoring what I was doing, or even cared what I achieved. I become demotivated and sluggish, doing less and less each day. My writing career seemed like a lifeline, and after I won Undiscovered Voices, I embraced that side of things, excited by the possibilities of leaving my awful day job.

Sadly, it was not to be. Not only did I fail to get published, but I discovered how insidious burnout is, how stealthily it infects every part of your life. Writing – the thing I had loved so much – became a desperate chore, and I struggled to put words on the page, even as my then-agent pressured me to deliver the manuscript. Full-blown depression followed, and I fell into a deep hole that it took several years to claw myself out of. As Anne Helen Petersen says, there is no getting better from burnout – it is a chronic condition. Even though I have since taken a much better day job and found my way back into writing, I regularly feel the demotivating forces pulling at me. I ask myself questions like “what’s the point?” and “why should I bother?” This often causes me to contemplate my own mortality, but rather than that motivating me to get on with stuff, it leads to a gloomy kind of pondering about whether one person can have much of an effect on our crazy world.

The nature of modern culture - and especially social media, with its endless facility for enabling comparisons – has certainly exacerbated the problem of burnout. Suddenly, the things in our lives that are supposed to reduce stress now actually increase it. Keeping fit and healthy has become a chore that fills up our already-overflowing schedules with gym sessions, yoga classes and quack “wellness” remedies. Even watching TV has become an exhausting experience, with a multitude of options and a new “must see” show popping up twice a week. A recent Nielsen report discovered that US adults watching streaming services are paralysed by choice, spending an average of 7 minutes selecting what to watch before every programme. We might mock the concept of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) but it’s a very clear manifestation of the burnout culture, this idea that no matter who you are, no matter what you do, there is always something better you could be doing.

Photo by Remy Sharp

If any of the above has resonated with you, what can you do to reduce your risk of burnout? As with many misunderstood conditions, opinion on treatment options varies. One of the articles I cited earlier actually found that building resilience made burnout worse, not better! This was possibly because the pressure of trying to be resilient was yet another stress on already over-stressed individuals. Those who are self-critical perfectionists (like me) are particularly at risk of this. As a counterpoint view, I read an article from Psychology Today that claimed writers never really get burned out, because "they have a built-in reserve of mojo to draw from" and a "sense of deeper purpose that can mitigate the frazzle of life no matter what happens with their work out there in the world." Of course, those of us who aren't magical butterflies may wish to seek a more practical solution!

This article offers some good advice on steps you can take. Particularly, it encourages detachment from external validation and criticism (think rejection emails), and being smart in your approach to social media. Focusing on the process rather than the outcome is another recommendation - I am finding it useful recently to think about the work as an end in itself, with no expectations of what it might lead to. The publishing industry is capricious, and I have got myself into trouble in the past by making grand assumptions.

It’s hard not to compare ourselves to other people - I have been frustrated with myself this week, feeling that my illustration skills are not at the level of my peers. At least it has stopped me worrying about my writing abilities, I suppose! The truth is that we are all on a continuum, and there will always be people who we perceive as being happier, more talented or more successful than we are. But these are just perceptions, and dangerous ones too. The road to burnout is paved with distorted thinking and the idea that working really, really, really hard will achieve our life goals. Yes, by all means be persistent in your approach. But try to be kind to yourself too.

Nick.

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Nick Cross is a children's writer/illustrator and Undiscovered Voices winner. He received a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award, for his short story The Last Typewriter.
Nick is also the Blog Network Editor for SCBWI Words & Pictures magazine. His Blog Break column appears fortnightly on W&P.

Drifting Away

By Nick Cross

Photo by Horia Varlan

What does it mean to be a writer? It’s a question that I’ve been grappling with a lot this year. And it’s a question that seems to naturally spawn many others:

• Do I need to be published?
• Do I even enjoy writing anymore?
• What would happen if I stopped writing altogether?
• What would my friends think of me?
• How much of my personal identity is bound up in my status as a writer?

Doing Less, Better

By Nick Cross



A month ago, I wrote the following on the wall of our top-secret Notes from the Slushpile hideout:

In the last week, I have:

• Attended two book launches
• Edited a 1500 word story down to 1000 words for the next issue of Stew Magazine
• Formatted and scheduled next week's Alphabet Soup article and started work on the week after
• Commissioned two more Alphabet Soup articles
• Written a Slushpile blog
• Worked full-time for 5 days

So why do I constantly feel like I'm not doing enough?

Why indeed? The Slushpile team were supportive in their replies (apart from Candy Gourlay who I trust was joking when she called me a lazy man!). But for me, the inherent problem lay in that final question. Why wasn't I satisfied with what I'd done, and what did I need to do to make sure that I was?

That led me to take a hard look at my own beliefs. For years, I believed that the more busy I was, the more I would get done. But what if that wasn't true? What if I could get better results and more satisfaction by doing less?

Keeping the Darkness on the Page - a Writer’s Guide to Building Resilience

By Nick Cross

To the uninitiated, writing appears to be a simple process of putting words onto the page. But the fact that I’ve re-written the sentence you’ve just read six times seems to indicate that perhaps it’s not that easy. To write well requires us to make a deep personal connection with the material, and this is where the trouble starts.

Ernest Hemingway famously said:

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

A trifle melodramatic, you might think, and just imagine the mess it caused to the internal workings of his typewriter! But we understand exactly what he meant. And there’s another use of the word “bleed” that is even more pertinent to the writing experience – the way that our daily experiences, ideas and emotions bleed into our work. Writing is not an activity that respects boundaries, in fact it actively thrives on recycling our happiest and saddest moments, tapping into our deepest fears and exposing our most shameful thoughts.