8,000 words

Is it just me? Maybe it's just me.

Dear Writer,

I wrote 8,000 words in a single day this week.

Well… I probably actually wrote about 6,000 new words, and then revised the 2,000 that I had already been working with. It was a whole chapter for a book that is kind of a secret project at the moment (I’ll let you know what it is if it goes anywhere) and it was so much fun.

But also… weirdly exhausting.

I have never understood why writing is so exhausting for me. It’s essentially just brain and fingers, but damn. I crashed all day yesterday and am feeling a bit better today, but why is it so physically exhausting? Mentally and emotionally exhausting, I get. But physically? I don’t get it.

The science is in, though; chess masters burn up to 6,000 calories a day during tournaments. Intense brain function creates physical stress the way exercise creates physical stress, and it burns calories and literally drains physical energy.

Now, my specific number from this week—8,000 words in a day—doesn’t really matter so much as it matters that that’s 4x my typical daily output when writing, which is between 1,500 and 2,000. It takes me a few hours to do 2,000 words, but when I do, I’m usually spent for the rest of the day. Also, when I’m writing, I find it hard to do much else. I end up watching movies or playing video games in a semi-zombie state, and then the next day I get up and go into the novel and exhaust myself all over again. Lather, rinse, repeat for three to six months and then there’s a book off to my editor and I spent two weeks in bed, wondering why I’m so damn tired.

Huh. I’d forgotten about that part.

It’s been so long since I’ve actively written a novel—non-fiction is an entirely different bag of beans for me—that I’d forgotten how it works, how withdrawn I get from everyone around me, how a certain percentage of my brain is always in the book, even when I’m doing other things. It sounds like I’m complaining, but I’m really not; I love writing. I love being half-deep in the story. But it’s weird, and it’s the first time I’ve written since Ian and I got together, so he’s getting used to the “You didn’t hear anything I just said, did you?” part of the deal.

We all know that writing isn’t simply typing or scribbling, but it’s not like any other kind of work I’ve ever done, either. Physical work will make me bodily tired, but my brain still has some snap to it. Purely mental work—like figuring out taxes or planning something in-depth or writing non-fiction—will exhaust me mentally, but physically I’ll still have some gas in the tank.

But writing exhausts me mentally, emotionally and physically. It’s good that it burns calories because I have not yet been able to engage in both exercise and writing on the same day. Whatever candle I burn to power the writing pulls on every resource I have, and then I have to spend the rest of the day doing nothing and wondering what’s wrong with me instead of just understanding that this is how it works for me.

I don’t know if that’s how it works for other writers, because I haven’t talked about this with other writers. Mostly because when my social circle was mostly other writers, I didn’t understand this as being something about writing; I thought, of course, that it was just that there was something wrong with me.

But… no. It’s definitely the writing. I wrote 8,000 words in a single day this week. It was fun. It was exciting. I lost time. And then I handed the chapter in to the publisher and was useless for the next 48 hours.

Such a weird thing. Writers out there; is this your experience, too? Or is it just me?

Everything,

L

P.S. I know I was supposed to do Best Friend Rom Coms this week. I did watch the movies, but I felt like talking about this today instead. I’ll follow up with that eventually, I promise. But you should know that I am entirely ruled by whimsy and caprice, especially when I’m actively writing, so maybe it’s a good idea if I don’t make plans for a while, and just allow myself to surf my whims for a while.