Writing when life gets tough
A story about how (not) to navigate overwhelm and creative burnout
I want to talk a little bit about writing during stressful life events, and how important it is to recognise the warning signs and give yourself space. And I’m going to do this by talking about my own experience of overwhelm, how I tried to ignore it, and the affect this had on my writing.
Please be aware that this post discusses the illness and hospitalisation of a young child—everyone involved is absolutely fine now, but if that’s something that’s going to upset you, I want you to know up front so you can make an informed decision about whether or not to read on.
Contents
A hell of a Monday morning
I’m posting this on 21 October 2025, the anniversary of my world temporarily falling apart. And I’m telling this story for two reasons. The first is, quite honestly, because I need to tell this story. The second is because I failed spectacularly to take my own advice about writing and overwhelm when this happened, and consequently pushed myself into a creative block that lasted for almost a year.
Here’s what happened: one Sunday evening, my husband presented at A&E due to the dangerous worsening of an ongoing chronic condition. The following day, while my husband was still being triaged, I had to rush my hallucinating, febrile 7-year-old son to the same A&E. Their illnesses were completely unconnected.
It was a hell of a Monday morning.
I’m going to protect everyone’s privacy and not discuss details of the actual diagnoses, except to say that everyone came out the other side, weeks or months later. I couldn’t discuss a diagnosis in my son’s case, anyway, because one week and two lumbar punctures later, there were still no answers (the best guess from his medical team was a virus of some kind, but they couldn’t identify which). What I will say is that there was more than one occasion as I sat alone by my son’s A&E bed—while an amazing team of doctors and nurses worked for hours to get his temperature and his heart rate down, while my son drifted in and out of consciousness and didn’t know who I was when he was awake—when I wasn’t sure if we were going to get him back.
I remember the strangest things about that day. I remember the placement of the plug sockets relative to the chair they found for me to sit in, because my phone was about to run out of charge. I remember my shoe was damp and uncomfortable from where I’d accidentally kicked one of our carved Halloween pumpkins as I tried to carry my barely conscious child out the front door and into the car. I remember struggling to keep up as the medical team ran with my son through the side door of the A&E building. I remember seeing his blood on the floor from where it had spilled as they rushed to insert a central line. I remember watching his heart rate skyrocket, and I remember asking, “Is that his heart?” And I remember how kind the nurse was as she told me, “No, no—don’t look at that, Mum,” and distracted me with admission details.
I remember more than anything just being completely baffled that, on an otherwise unremarkable Monday morning, we’d gone from “Hmm, I wonder if I should call the GP?” to “Right, this definitely warrants a call to the practice’s emergency line” to “Okay, we need an ambulance right now,” all in less than 15 minutes.
I don’t remember feeling much of anything else in the hours that I sat by his side. I suspect I was in shock.
When my son came back to me, he came back all of a sudden. He opened his eyes and he smiled at me, and I could see my little boy in there again. He knew who I was. He enjoyed his CT scan enormously, he enjoyed the wheelchair he had to travel in, and then he enjoyed the ice cream the nurses found for him when he got up to the ward that night, too late for dinner. He fell asleep shortly afterwards, but it was a proper sleep; the difference was very clear. And I sat alone in his hospital room long into the night and couldn’t even cry.
My son was in hospital for a little under a week, in the end. During the day, he and I played Uno between tests and meds and two-hourly obs, and sometimes he would sleep and I would try to write.
Internal and external obstacles
I talk a lot, in my classes and 1:1 sessions, about internal writing obstacles and external writing obstacles. Internal writing obstacles are the phone call that comes from inside the house: they’re the creative self-doubt that makes you question your abilities as a writer; they’re procrastination; they’re the notion that writing must be done a certain way and if you don’t do it that way, you shouldn’t be writing. These are the blocks that I counsel authors to push through, because they’re a way of keeping ourselves inside a comfort zone: safe, but static.
External obstacles, though, are the forces that swoop in and upend our lives in some way. Maybe there’s a huge project at work that needs you to stay late every day for a fortnight. Maybe your bathroom sink has sprung a leak and the kitchen ceiling’s partially fallen in. Maybe your partner has just given birth (an external obstacle doesn’t have to upend your life in a bad way).
Or maybe a loved one is in hospital.
When an external obstacle hits, my advice is always, always take a step back. Give yourself room to adapt and recover as best you can. Your writing will still be there on the other side of the obstacle, but overwhelm and creativity don’t play well together. If you push yourself too hard when you’re already overwhelmed, you’re likely to burn out. It’s frustrating as hell, because writing is supposed to be our escape from reality, and yet when we most need that escape, the words quite often just won’t come.
“Overwhelm and creativity don’t play well together. If you push yourself too hard when you’re already overwhelmed, you’re likely to burn out.”
Writing when the sky is falling down
During the first Covid-19 lockdown, social media was full of authors who’d finally found the time to work on their novels. I’ve had more than one of them in my class in the years between then and now and they were—justly—very proud of their achievements. I was also among the writers who found it easier to write in a world where many of the usual external distractions had been removed, but I’m a hermit by nature and lockdown basically enabled my most misanthropic tendencies. I only had one child in those days, who turned 3 years old in lockdown, and, while I was frightened for our family and for my parents, I wasn’t dealing with homeschooling, or teenagers suddenly stripped of their social support network. My writing classes moved online with very little hassle, so I had an income, and nobody I knew was designated an essential worker. Don’t get me wrong: I hated lockdown and I found the whole of 2020 both existentially terrifying and deeply stressful, but it was a manageable sort of stress.
And so I was able to write. I wasn’t writing dystopian fiction (no need for that in 2020), but I had a very rich and productive few months of crafting ghost stories, all but one of which have gone on to find homes in various magazines since then.
Other writers—many other writers—found themselves in a state of creative paralysis, unable to write a single word. In fact, I’d venture to suggest that this group of writers were in the majority, but were simply hesitant to say as much when the online world was so full of smug little dictums like, “If you’re not completing your novel during lockdown, you never lacked the time—you just lack motivation.” Those slogans made me mad enough to spit. People were dying. People were losing loved ones. People were losing their jobs; their income—people were afraid of losing their homes. The Covid lockdowns—necessary as they were—were horrible and stressful and devastating. And horror, stress and devastation are not emotions that sit comfortably alongside creativity.
But the thing is, we don’t want to let go of our writing when the sky is falling in. It’s supposed to be our escape from reality. It’s crushingly, soul-suckingly unfair that at the very moment we need our creative flow the most, it’s often furthest from our reach.
This is the terrible power of overwhelm.
I’ve written stories since I was old enough to hold a pen. It’s an inseparable part of who I am; I’m just not fully me if I’m not writing. I joke that I’m a writer first and a human being second, but… it’s only partially a joke. Writing is how I process the bad stuff. I wrote about marital separation when my parents were splitting up. I wrote about bereavement when a friend lost their life far too young. I wrote just so many ugly break-up stories before I met my husband. Writing is how I deal with life when life gets rough.
While my son and husband were in hospital, I knew, objectively, that I was overwhelmed. I knew I needed room to process. But I make my living from the written word. I had deadlines to meet. And I just… really didn’t want this other really important thing to be taken away from me too.
So… I pushed on. I overshot my deadlines by a country mile, but I delivered the work. It was even good work (I think).
And then, when my son was out of hospital and—much later—my husband was too… my words abruptly evaporated.
Total engine failure
What I’d done, you see, was exactly what I warn other writers about: I’d made writing a source of stress at a time when stress was already in plentiful supply.
It is possible for writing to be an escape from reality when times are tough, but it’s a question of mindset. In order for writing to be an escape, there must be minimal pressure on that writing. Journaling is a great example of this: it’s writing that exists solely for the writer; writing that’s not intended to be read by anyone else. The writing I’d done as a teenager in order to vent some complicated and confusing emotions was a form of this, though I didn’t know it at the time: I thought I was writing important literature, but I was actually trauma dumping on a page (and I have zero regrets). It’s not publishable, but I had very little idea of what was publishable as a teenage writer, and so there was no pressure on these stories to be anything other than what they were: a long howl of distress in the way that works best for me.
This is… less possible when one starts to write for other people.
And by “write for other people,” I mean writing with publication in mind. This inevitably changes the process of writing. KM Weiland describes this transition like this:
“When I was a child, I danced with my creativity. We went on so many adventures together, but I was never the one who led or commanded. If anything, I simply followed wherever my imagination led. Later, when I started writing down my stories, I began taking on the identity of ‘writer.’ In some ways, this was an important and wonderful transition into a greater consciousness of the art form and a responsibility for my own disciplined approach to the craft. In other ways, it was the moment when I stopped treating my precious creativity as a consensual partner and began placing demands upon it.” [source]
As Weiland says, there’s nothing inherently sinister about this transition. Writing a novel is work, and work demands a level of commitment or discipline that’s at odds with the playful way we engage our creativity when it’s simply for the joy of creation. We have to take a slight step out of the idea of creation-for-joy when we step into the idea of creation-for-profession, and that’s okay. That doesn’t strip the process of joy; it simply adds a layer of intentionality to it that doesn’t always feel like passion (but often does).
But that intentionality does, inevitably, add some pressure on your words that wasn’t there before. It makes you aware of their cadence, their flow, their narrative build. It makes you interrogate your writing, because that writing now has to “measure up” to the purpose for which it’s been created.
In other words, we’ve introduced an element of stress into the process of writing. When life is generally fine, that’s manageable. It still feels good to write. Add in the stress of an external obstacle, though, and you’ve got yourself a situation.
When my family was on hospital, there was pressure on me from a dozen different angles. And then I’d added onto that the pressure of writing—this thing that was supposed to rescue me from life—and expected the stresses to just sort of… cancel each other out. I’d tied my writing to the imaginary succeed/fail binary by which I was judging the messy fraying ends of my non-writing life. So when my family were safe and my overwhelmed brain had a chance to tap the brakes even slightly… it reacted by shutting down the whole engine.
Easy does it
I’ve been lucky. My family are well, and my creative block has worked itself out in under a year. Other writers have taken much, much longer to come back from this kind of burnout. But I found a way back in, and I nudged it gently, and now I’m writing again and it feels great.
I would much prefer, though, to have never had to grapple with the burnout in the first place. Because it’s scary. It feels as though something precious has been ripped away, and it feels as though it may never come back again. I knew, academically, that I hadn’t lost my words—that they were just hiding—but when something so fundamental to me was gone for so long, there’s no way not to worry that it’s gone for good.
So I suppose, on the anniversary of my world temporarily falling apart, the way I want to celebrate getting through it and out the other side is by making sure anyone who reads this knows that it’s okay to take a break. It’s okay to rest. It’s more than okay, in fact: it’s vital. Because if you don’t take a rest on purpose, there’s a good chance that your body is going to take a rest all by itself, and you’ll have much less control over when and how that happens.
(But your writing will be waiting for you on the other side, regardless.)
Have you ever pushed yourself to write when you needed to stop and recover? Let’s talk about it in the comments.
Read next
