Self-Care for Writers – Final Thoughts

Happy Author

I’ve been running a writing message board for many years now, starting long before MySpace and LifeJournal and Facebook.

And once we had a member who was being pushed by a writing coach. He was supposed to write a short story every week and submit it somewhere, to build a name and a writing career.

A short story per week.

Now, if you think 5,000-10,000 words per week, that’s entirely doable. And I believe that with the right support in place, with good self-care, plenty of time to write, good food and exercise and such, it is even doable for a long time.

This kind of work used to be a great strategy for building a name in the genre field. And having 50 stories per year to submit and show up in various magazines is a great tactic. In theory, at least.

Or you could put that amount of work into a novel, and you’d end up with one every two to three months.

If you have a professional author set-up, it’s even easy. Writing much more than 5-10k per week is entirely possible. I know people who write that much that every day. They put in 8 hours on their writing just like a job.  They treat it like a business and a job, and they still enjoy it. They tend to make a living as writer.

This guy didn’t. He had a day job. He had no support. And I wasn’t surprised at all when he disappeared after three or four months, utterly burned out. I still blame his coach…

When I think about self-care for writers, I often think about people like him.

And if you think about it, it is really simple:

You need to take good care of yourself.

Especially, if you want to be good at writing and have a successful career. Because body, mind and soul are connected, and you can’t just use one and ignore the others.

Read that again.

We must take care of all three. Body, mind and soul.

In a way that works for you.

And only you can figure out what that is, but it’s so worth it!

Here’s some tapping for this:

Even though it’s so much effort to take good care of myself, all that precious time wasted for cooking and exercise and sleep (!), but I still love and accept myself anyway, and I now choose to know that I need to nourish all of myself in order to write well.

Even though I don’t want to waste time and energy on feeding myself, or on exercise or such, I’m totally okay the way I am, and I choose to know that this is important for my writing self.

Even though I hate the whole idea of self-care, I just want to write and make a living with it, I’m still totally okay the way I am, and I now give myself permission to take good care of myself so I can keep writing for many years.

Asking you:
What do you do for self-care?
How do you feel about doing more?
What happened while you were tapping?
And finally – what are you creating right now?
Please share in a comment.

Image Source: F. Moebius

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