As writers, we often assume that the more words we ingest each day the better we build up our stores for writing good stories. While I definitely believe that a steady diet of literature (and writing, of course) is the quickest way to gain strength as a writer, I’ve also learned that, like any good thing, one can overdo it.
Recently I was reading and writing so much that words no longer made much sense to me. I’m not exaggerating. During the final week of my most recent semester in my MFA program, I graded 40 final papers and 40 final exams, filed two freelance articles, and turned in 120 manuscript pages—the equivalent of a master’s thesis. The week before, I read four novels for class and critiqued eight of my classmates' writing projects.
By the end of this period, I was having to read a sentence as many as five times in order to fully understand it. My brain felt like an overworked muscle. This was a bit frightening, since I have several time-sensitive writing goals, and, given my life circumstances (four children still at home), my writing time is already very limited. So I decided the best remedy was to embark on a week-long wordfast: a complete abstention from reading and writing for a full seven days.
I first learned of this concept years ago while participating in The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron’s popular program for unlocking creativity. In her book about the method, Cameron calls this short-term self-denial “reading deprivation,” and she believes it’s one of the most productive tools for creatives in any discipline.
“For most artists, words are like tiny tranquilizers,” she writes. “We have a daily quota of media chat that we swallow up. Like greasy food, it clogs our system. Too much of it and we feel, yes, fried.” (In recent years, she has expanded her weeklong prohibition to include additional media—movies and television, news and social media. Although I limited my intake of all of these, I mainly focused on avoiding the written word.)
Cameron goes on to explain that for writers in particular, reading can become an “addiction,” where we “gobble the words of others rather than digest our own thoughts and feelings, rather than cook up something of our own.” While I hadn’t been overdosing on reading as a means to avoid writing, I definitely felt too burned out to produce any new writing of my own. I couldn’t summon a single idea. I needed a reset, or as she puts it, a return to “play.”
As Carmeron warned in the book, wordfasting was hard. For years I have woken early each morning so I could enjoy a quiet hour of reading, and I have dedicated a large portion of each day to writing or something writing adjacent (usually more reading). During the first day or two of my wordfast, there were a lot of quiet hours when I was forced to sit alone with my thoughts. It was often uncomfortable. I would reflexively reach for a book, but, unable to read a book, I felt the constant urge to pick up my phone. I had to wrap a rubber band around it as a reminder not to open the screen and fill the void in my days by reading the news or scrolling social media.
What does one even do when not reading and writing?, I wondered. I had been so deep in the weeds of my literary obsessions lately that I had completely abandoned all of my other hobbies and neglected my physical health and even a few friends. I spent much of my wordfast getting back into my body by working out daily, going on hikes with friends, and catching up on some much-needed weeding in my actual home garden. I had to take a nap almost every afternoon to make up for all of that physical exertion. I also took a page from Cameron’s book and went on a solo “artist date” to a nearby city, where I saw a new art exhibit and treated myself to a fancy lunch. And the first hour of each morning, the one I used to spend reading? I spent it watching the sunrise from my deck and listening to the symphony of birdsong in the ravine behind my house.
As Cameron predicted, when I returned to the page a week later, I felt well rested, my creative cup full and ready to spill onto the page. The first books I read, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides and Weather by Jenny Offill‚ I chose carefully, and they were a revelation. Every sentence, every word sometimes, crackled with vividness. It reminded me of the first time I put on glasses, when I was in the fifth grade: how I was suddenly able to see the individual leaves on every tree. Quite unexpectedly (or not at all unexpectedly, as Cameron would argue), I found a subject for a new short story and about a week after my wordfast, I felt ready to sit down and write it. The effort was slow at first, awkward—as it is any time you have been forced to rest a strained muscle, but soon I was up and running again, and by the end of a week I had written most of a very rough first draft.
It’s been about a month now since my wordfast, and my brain feels fully restored. I am back on a “Goldilocks” diet of reading and writing: not too little, not too much, but just enough. I have retained some of my habits from that week, though. I’ve kept the ritual of spending the first hour of each day on my deck, watching the sunrise and listening to the birdsong, but I now do it with a book in hand. Bliss!
I’m sure I will encounter writing burnout again, probably as soon as my next semester of graduate school ends, but now I know how to treat what ails me, and the good news is that the cure takes only a week.
My kernel of advice: A short abstention from reading and writing can be just the solution to getting the words to flow again.
Wordfasting can feel scary! How can a writer fill so many empty hours? Here are some of Cameron’s suggestions (and a few of my own) for what to do when you can’t read or write:
Listen to music
Visit a museum
Weed the garden
Knit, sew, mend
Watercolor
Cook
Paint the room pink
Have friends over for dinner
Workout
Go hiking with a friend, family member
Sort through that old trunk of memorabilia in the attic (you know the one!)
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Shelby attended the kick-off session for Hurley Winkler’s Summer Writing Nights, a 13-week co-working program. While she was tempted to use the two-hour block to work on writing-adjacent activities, she decided to commit this time to exploring a new writing project, giving it the space to grow into whatever it needs to be.
This week Sarah read and critiqued a workshop partner’s novel and was impressed by its multi-layered relationships, which inspired her to nail down the relationship dynamics in the novella she has just started writing. Sarah also began reading Francis Spalding’s biography of the artist Vanessa Bell and enjoyed watching the replay of literary agent CeCe Lyra’s recent webinar on writing interiority.
Natalia is in the throes of pregnancy, which has resulted in a complete halt of reading and writing. However, the pain relief that walking brings has meant many NYC adventures before she moves in three weeks.
Along with the other Kernelists, Neidy read and critiqued a friend's novel manuscript this week.