purpose & burnout

QUERIES

The night before I turned twenty-seven, I was crying in the bathtub, accepting what I feared had been coming for a few months—I’d run out of viable agents to submit my novel to. It was time to stop querying this book.

The first time I stopped querying a book, I was nineteen, brand new to publishing and wanting a literary agent for the YA fantasy series I’d been writing since I was fourteen. I sent out about five queries before I realized I had no idea what I was doing.

I cried in my dorm’s stairwell and then took a step back, reassessed, and decided I’d study publishing and the current market before trying again. I didn’t query that book again until I was twenty-three. It was with a resigned sigh of I conceived of this book before I understood what sells, and I have a feeling this one won’t, but I’ll throw it out there. I told myself this was why it shouldn’t hurt when no agent wanted it. It hurt anyway.

The book I wrote when I was twenty-three and queried when I was twenty-four felt more promising from a marketing perspective. I thought, okay, this one’s it. And it wasn’t. I cried, but eventually, I reasoned that I’d been thinking too much about the market. I hadn’t fallen in love with the book, the characters, the world. That love was the internal compass that guided me through my first (unmarketable) series. I just needed a book with that elusive combination of marketable and passionate, and then I’d have done everything right.

I found that book when I was twenty-four, wrote it when I was twenty-five, and queried it at twenty-six. Over and over, I’d heard that the people who didn’t make it as authors were the ones who quit. So I just wouldn’t quit. If a book didn’t get an agent, I’d simply write another one and query that one, forever, until the right book hit a bullseye. This felt very two plus two equals four to me, because I was a relentless person.

Did you know that relentlessness can be finite?

A DEATH

Something broke in me in that bathtub and I did not come back to myself.

It was the night before my twenty-seventh birthday—January 2020. A crappy start to the year. My heart, freshly mourning what I called “the Mist book,” promised it would write a new one. 2020 would not have to suck. (Ha.)

But…something about the new book wasn’t working. I liked the characters. I was writing well on a prose level. I was learning about worldbuilding, messily, since this was my first serious foray into high fantasy (the book I wrote at twenty-three was technically high fantasy, but the worldbuilding was so thin I hardly count it). I plodded through 150k words of it (yes, that is not a typo) until I crashed headlong into a mental health crisis that would change me as a person (first for the worse, then for the better). This brought that book to a screeching halt.

At age twenty-eight I started a fresh novel. I put more effort into the world than I had any world before, in terms of building a functional, internally logical setting. I found the villain exhilarating, though none of the other characters lit a fire in me. I continued to improve my prose. I enjoyed building scenes and breathing life into a story with words, as usual.

But, like with the last book, writing became a chore. Writing sessions weren’t fulfilling—not occasionally, but always. I would reach exciting plot moments, indulge in fun character interactions, bring the story in the direction I wanted…and I was bored. I—the book—both of us—felt hollow and lifeless. At twenty-nine, 100k words into the novel, I became more invested in my D&D character than my independent writing and took a break. That break never ended. I abandoned another book.

What was happening to me? It couldn’t be burnout. Burnout was the visitor of a few weeks, or a few months, or maybe a season. Not years. Burnout wasn’t meant to hang around long enough to chip away at your identity.

Writing was the one thing I was always supposed to have. And now it was gone.

NO RESURRECTION FOR A DEAD THING

I cannot tell you how many revelations I had that were supposed to fix it. Morgan, you’re too focused on exploiting your trauma in your fiction—remember when your writing was more lighthearted? Sillier? Do that! I did. It seemed promising for a bit, and then writing became stagnant again.

Okay, then—the problem was that I’d forgotten how to write for myself instead of for the market. No, it was that I’d lost my writing community (Twitter was dust) and needed to find a new one. No, it was that the constant rejection had rattled my confidence beyond repair. No, it was that I was using Microsoft Word instead of Scrivener. No, it was that I was taking it too seriously. No, it was that I wasn’t listening to the right music. No, it was that I wasn’t falling in love with my characters in the way I used to. No, it was that I was putting pressure on myself to love my characters the way I used to, and I had to find a different method. No, it was that writing may never feel the same way again.

Writing may not ever feel the same way again.

Grief. If you aren’t careful, grief becomes home. I lived in the denial stage, the anger stage, the sadness stage. Never acceptance. If I accepted that writing would never bring me that feeling ever again, I swore I wasn’t me anymore.

It didn’t help that all of my hobbies had become more difficult to engage with. I pushed myself to cowrite season one of a narrative fiction podcast in 2021; by the time we were meant to write season two, putting a single word down felt impossible. Reading had become tedious—why was every book boring before the fifty page mark? Even books by authors I’d previously loved? None of it moved me or enthralled me. None of it kept my attention.

Video games weren’t calling to me, either. By late 2022/early 2023, it took heaps of energy to convince myself to stream on Twitch. Once I got pregnant and the first trimester nausea hit, I stopped streaming, and I haven’t streamed since. Another hobby down the drain.

What was I even spending my time on anymore?

I didn’t want to leave the house. I wanted easy serotonin, not anything involving effort. The only activities that mattered anymore involved spending time with loved ones. Alone time was torture—a strange reality for someone with many homebody-friendly interests. I spent too many hours scrolling Twitter and TikTok, and I absolutely loathed it, but any other task seemed out of my reach.

To be fair, this was not just burnout—it was also chronic depression, chronic anxiety, and, in 2023, pregnancy (I did not have a pleasant pregnancy). There were several factors. But whenever I thought about writing, I felt profound grief. I would look at my Instagram handle, morganyorkwrites, and think, ha, well, does she? Did the publishing dream take my love of writing with it when it died? Is it dead, beyond resurrecting? Am I a liar for pretending I’m still a writer?

And then, my daughter.

REJUVENATION

This part made me hesitant to write this essay. I don’t want my daughter to exist on the internet. I want her kept blissfully away from it until she is old enough to interact with it herself.

More than that, I have become intensely protective of my personal life and what aspects of it get shared online. The public, I have thought with some slightly misplaced hostility, doesn’t get to have so much of me. I (voluntarily) put too much of myself on display for too long. Stricter boundaries around that became necessary.

But I also like personal essays. I like writing and sharing my writing. Writing is such a confessional act. How do I get to the heart of what I want to say while guarding myself so closely?

That is an essay for another time. As far as my daughter is concerned, I bring her up to discuss a result of her birth, not her as an entity. Other than that, put her out of your mind. She is a baby and she isn’t for you.

For centuries (perhaps millennia), the topics of purpose and motherhood have been intertwined, too often to connote shame. If you don’t become a mother, you will lack a purpose. Obviously (I should hope it’s obvious), I don’t subscribe to this worldview. But when I—enthusiastically and with conviction—became pregnant, this idea haunted me, anyway.

I was concerned about burdening a child with my sense of purpose. My emotional fulfillment is not her responsibility. I did not want motherhood swallowing my identity, for her sake and mine. I wanted to model a life that found enrichment from many things.

Imagine my surprise when becoming a mother created feelings of purpose in unexpected ways.

So often, before she was born, I would scroll on my phone for hours because I froze up. I’d try convincing myself to read or write or play a video game, and I refused, ruled by fear—what if it wasn’t fulfilling enough? What if I chose the wrong book or the wrong game and I wasted my time? What if the writing session reminded me, once again, that my love for writing was rotting? Bite-sized entertainment on my phone was easier. Safer. It wouldn’t disappoint, and nor would it invigorate. My brain felt slimy and atrophied.

Babies, of course, take a lot of time and attention. She has to eat, she needs changing, she needs a bath, she needs soothing. So those moments when she’s asleep, or when my spouse takes over? Gold mines of opportunity. Morgan, if you want to do something for yourself, better do it now. You don’t get the luxury of dawdling anymore as you decide. Now or never.

Suddenly, choosing to write became much easier. Choosing to read. Choosing to game. I had only so much time to devote to each activity, and that made them sacred.

Somehow, the way I feel when I write has changed. There’s less…anxiety. Less urgency, less pressure. It might be helpful that I’m writing something in a genre I’ve heard doesn’t sell, so I can (finally) trick myself into believing my end goal is enjoyment, not publication. Maybe it’s just that this genre isn’t high fantasy—still fantasy, but lower—and is thus more comfortable to me. Or maybe these things have nothing to do with it, and it’s a fluke. Maybe I just needed time to live in the burnout. Maybe I needed caring for a brand new life to matter to me more than something as wrapped up in ego as my writing.

I don’t know. It’s possible this is temporary and will pass again. But motherhood has also taught me to revel in the temporary. It goes so fast. She used to be so small. She will never be this small again.

Writing has shown up for you again, Morgan, here and now, so go. Meet it. Live and write. Live and write. Live and write.

I am thirty-one, and I am writing again.

Song to pair with this essay: Sanity by Paramore