On the Cycles of Living through the Lens of the Writer’s Life

All anyone cares about these days is productivity. How can I be more efficient with my time so I can get more stuff done? Our capitalist, post-Industrial Revolution world sees us all as numbers and that number often boils down to tasks completed, sales made, word count. Busyness is a status symbol. Burnout, according to Anne Helen Petersen, the defining condition of our time. Somewhere along the line our worth became defined by our contribution to society. 

I don’t have a regular income job. I’m busy, yes: managing my household, parenting my atypical son as a stay-at-home-mom, and carving out a writing life. Despite all this, I am ashamed of not bringing in an income. I have no marketable skills and am very privileged that our family is happy on my husband’s income. I turn to my to do list and attempt to optimize it over and over so I can increase my number of tasks completed each day to try to find a sense of self worth.

Enter my depression and its absolute disdain for productivity which of course not only fuels the shame, and thus fuels itself, but results in my pretty inconsistent productivity tallies and sense of self in this capitalist world. Depression cycles in and out of my life. But isn’t that life? If it weren’t depression, it would be pain, chronic illness, stress, crises exhaustion or just busyness. 

We are not robots. We are not consistent beings. And we are interdependent on one another. Thus, even if we are on a plateau of consistency, we can be thrown off course by the life cycle of a family member, friend, or coworker. The industrial revolution was centered on automation of production. But we are not automatons, as much as capitalism would like us to be. We are beings who live our lives on a cycle of days, weeks, months, seasons, and years. Hormonal cycles. The life cycle. Nature is about cycles, rhythms, produce and rest. Nothing in nature goes hard all throughout the year. Trees lose their leaves to conserve energy in winter. Animals hibernate. We have been trying to discipline the nature out of us but nature will always win.

It was sometime last summer that I realized that my own life cycles between three life situations. I originally identified it as a cycle of living well, which is interrupted by a crisis or depression, which then results in restarting, unless the interruption is brief in which case I sometimes can go straight back to living well.

Then I took a class with author Wayde Compton and he talked about his theory of the rupture in the writing process, which he believes is a necessary part of any project’s development. The rupture is any moment when the smooth sailing of creating something suddenly is capsized, derailed, crashes. The project is turned on its head.  

This sounded like life to me. Life is good. Donald Trump becomes president of America creating a rupture in the world. We all have to rebuild. Now I’ve renamed my three phases of life as Build, Rupture and Rebuild. 

Before I get into why this seemingly common sense realization matters, let me tell you about the work of Anne Hungerford, a woman who studied the creative process, whom Wayde also taught us about. The findings of hers that he highlighted for the class were that writers spend very little of their writing time actually writing: fifty percent of our time is spent revising our writing and about 30-40% of our time is spent “inventing.” The inventing part is interesting because that’s the part that the industrial revolution killed, as Wayde explained. Before it, writers and other artists would honour the process of thinking and brainstorming, of living so that ideas would come to them. Deep creating comes from deep living. But after, writers became obsessed with word counts. Wayde himself had a mentor that preached a mandatory thousand words a day for all writers. A later class with Ray Hsu taught me that there is a difference between honouring the product (word count, publications, awards, bestseller lists) and honouring the process, the act of creation. We tend to honour the product more than the process. 

This is another cycle, this time of writing—inventing, drafting, revising. I know so many writers who beat themselves up if they do not write words on their current projects every day. We need to honour the time we spend living and thinking, brainstorming and creating without necessarily drafting or revising. The humming and hawing over a new idea. The experimentation. 

Recently, I was in the rupture—I was super depressed—but I was also inventing. A rupture can of course happen at any stage in the cycle of writing but it will always precipitate a back to the drawing board state of inventing and experimentation. If a rupture can also be a period of invention, then perhaps I need to honour the rupture period and make space for myself when I’m in it. 

Build, rupture, rebuild. Digging deeper into these three phases in my life and perhaps yours. The characteristics of the build are productivity, checking off the task list, keeping routines going and the home clean, being social, living life to the best of your current ability. This is the phase of consistency. It also means running with whatever new systems were born of the rebuild/invention phase. In terms of the cycle of creating, this is where drafting and revising happens. I classify this as the build because life, even normal consistent life, is always building towards a goal. 

So you’re going along life and you’re thinking that nothing could go wrong. Things feel good, or at least normal. Then the rupture happens. The rupture can be positive: a happy life event or an exciting new idea for a project. But it can also be negative: a crisis, illness or, in my case, a depression. During the rupture, the systems built in the rebuild and executed in the build, are no longer maintained. Routines go out the window and tasks become triaged. This is a bare minimum, emergency mode, only the necessities of life phase. The more time spent here, the worse things get. Often, we are isolated as we deal with the crisis. The longer we spend here, the longer the rebuild will take. If the rupture is short enough, however, we can move right back into our systems and the build phase. But the rupture period also can allow for a lot of internal time, time spent inventing. Sometimes big ideas come out of this period. Ruptures are also what we end up writing about later. No one writes about the day to day life because it’s boring. Ruptures are the plot points in life. 

Rebuilds are the fall-out from the plot points. After a recovery period which is part of the rupture, the rebuild can begin. This, for me, is motivated by a feeling of being lost and needing to find my way again. They are the readjustments, the new normals. This stage involves a lot of planning, learning of new techniques, creating new goals, new routines, new structures. It’s a period of introspection, re-evaluation, and recalibrating. Sometimes it’s all internal work, thinking it through, brainstorming, trial and error of new ideas. From the outside, this phase of the cycle can look like a fallow period. The home continues to be messy, unimportant tasks continue to be put off while we figure life out again. 

At least this is how life goes for me. I overthink EVERYTHING. I can’t function without a plan, I feel lost without a list. If it’s not written down, it ain’t getting done. I scaffold my life on an ever more elaborate to do list. I started with Wunderlist, went to Todoist, then Trello, then Airtable, a brief period in Things, and back to Airtable. Organization is my passion but also my lifeline. 

I feel like this theory could work for people with a less complicated system of life scaffolding as well. Everyone experiences unexpected life events or massive ideas for new projects. This is life. There is a period of living the crisis, getting through it, followed by the rebuild and finding of a new normal then living the new normal. 

The sooner we accept that we as people are not capable of robotic consistency, that we have productive days and less overtly productive days as a natural part of the ebb and flow of life, the better we can accept our less productive days. The greater acceptance we have, the less stress, the less beating ourselves up, the less burnout. If burnout is the product of our post-industrial, capitalist society, maybe returning to nature’s waves, accepting them, is the cure. 

This post first appeared on my blog https://thewordscomeinwaves.com/ in 2020.