I've been experiencing a writerly...ennui as of late.
I hesitate to use the dreaded "B" word. Burn out. I hesitate to use it because once the word takes spectre-like form in my brain it's liable to be haunting me for months. But I also hesitate to use because it's not exactly accurate. It's not that I don't have ideas anymore or can't remember how to write. It's not that the work isn't any good. It's as good as it ever was (which I guess was always a matter of opinion anyway). It just takes more effort. Like having to peddle a flying machine rather than using wings. I can still get airborne, but flying isn't quite as fun.
No, the only word I can think to describe this is ennui. I don't feel like writing. If I make myself write -- which I have to do of course, since I have a million deadlines and a mortgage that depends on me meeting them -- the work is fine. It's slow, granted. I'm only doing 1 - 2K a day. But since that's the schedule I recommend to my writing students, it's a perfectly respectable -- and productive number.
It's not that I want to go do something else. I can't think of anything I'd rather do -- other than swim, watch movies, eat, drink wine, and read. So one of these days I'll probably do a post on burn-out and how to reset your creative buttons. One thing I find useful is to go do something else creative, and to that end I've been experimenting creating book trailers.
I'm not sure when the idea took root exactly. I've been reading a few articles on promotion and book trailers are one of those things getting a fair bit of press. The New York Times had an article this week on authors doing a "star turn." You know, those trailers where the author gets up and reads from her book or discusses how she came to write it -- those are actually the most prevalent trailers and probably the least effective.
Anyway, I started out trying to hire someone to do a couple of trailers for me, but as I studied trailers and got pricing from folks, I couldn't help thinking how neat some of these trailers were and how FUN it would be to put something like that together. And of course as I was studying all these sites I kept coming across How To articles on doing book trailers yourself, and several of them pointed out that most of us already have some limited movie making softwear on our computers.
Well, say no more, say no more!
One of my best tricks for battling burn-out is to simply throw myself into some other creative endeavor. Music is always a good one. I'd love to paint, but I'm not painter sadly, despite a lot of art classes and the fact that nearly everyone in my family can draw or paint. Anyway, I started playing around with doing my own book trailers. Now, I won't pretend that the results are professional-looking. For one thing my trailer is too long, for another, it's too busy, and for a third, I don't know what the heck I'm doing, but I had a lot of fun with it. And, oddly enough, it revitalized my enthusiasm for this particular book, The Darkling Thrush.
Best of all, it resparked my creativity. It was relatively easy to do, too. Of course that's probably apparent from the quality of the thing, but hey! So without further adieu, my first book trailer.
