The Overtrained Writer
Almost everybody knows what a bad workout feels like. You show up, you go through the motions, you keep good form, but it’s just not your day. Your muscles were weak, your heart wasn’t in it, and when you finish, you don’t feel energized. You definitely didn’t hit any PRs or push any max weights. You just feel done.
Writing has days like that, too.
You sit down, you put in the time, but the scene isn’t clicking. The dialogue feels flat. All the letters are jumbling together, and you can’t focus. You know something’s off, but it’s hard to say what. You close the doc and walk away feeling vaguely defeated.
That’s a bad writing day. It happens to everyone, and it doesn’t mean anything on its own. The problem is when those days start stacking. Where you’re grinding through every session, and nothing’s connecting, and the thing you used to love is starting to feel like something you dread. You’re not building anymore, you’re breaking down.
In fitness, this is called overtraining. And the same thing can happen in writing.
When I coached people in fitness, the ones who burned out fastest were never the ones who lacked dedication. They were the ones who came in on day one, totally locked in — they hit everything at max effort, got to be gasping for air, threw up, and left completely wrecked — then couldn’t come back on day two.
Those people weren’t weak, some weren’t even out of shape; it’s just that they went too hard too fast before they built the habit.
Writers do the same thing. They decide they’re going to write a novel and plan a schedule with a 5,000-word-per-day goal. Awesome. Ambitious. Love it. On day one, they hit it. It took eight hours, but they hit it. And day two — look at that — again, they hit the word count. But this time, it took even longer — eleven hours. Damn.
Then, the weekend ended, and they’re working writers — so nobody is paying them to do this, it’s just their dream — and they’re back to their job. So the whole week goes by, and that 5,000-word target is so intimidating they don’t even want to attempt it.
This is a writing debt. Most of the time, it’s self-imposed.
Now, to be fair, 5,000 words is ambitious, but when you’re starting out, you don’t know what your process is yet. If you miss a day, suddenly you’re behind, and being behind is demoralizing, and demoralization is how you learn to dread the page.
So, just like with workouts, I don’t believe in rep counts or weight counts as much as time. Dedicated, consistent effort. I believe in time, wholeheartedly.
Nobody “has” time to go to the gym — they make time. They say no to scrolling, going out with friends, sleeping in, or something else. You don’t have time to write, either. You make time to write. And making time usually means sacrificing something else — sleep, TV, the fun, relaxing, comfortable thing you’d rather be doing. That’s sacrifice.
But showing up consistently within that time, day after day, without needing every session to be your best one — that’s discipline.
They’re not the same thing, but you need both.
The goal is never to crush yourself on day one. The goal is to still be writing on day 100. On day 300. To build something sustainable enough that the bad days don’t break the streak — they just, interrupt it for a little bit.
Cormac McCarthy told Oprah a story about an MIT professor friend of his who’d been totally rocked by an unsolvable problem — the guy was irritable, depressed, but kept a notepad by the bed just in case. One night, he dreamed he was having lunch with John Nash (remember A Beautiful Mind, so good!), and he woke up with the answer to the equation. He jotted it down, just like that, and later that day, proved it right.
McCarthy’s point was that the subconscious never really clocks out. It just doesn’t talk to you directly — it works indirectly, in dreams, in images, or in the thing that hits you while you’re driving. He said the subconscious might actually be a committee, having meetings, deciding what you’re ready to hear and when.
I think about that a lot when I’m stuck. The consistency is what keeps your brain on the project. The rest, in between sessions, is what lets it actually solve things.
Consistency in writing, putting in the hours, activates your subconscious like nothing else. It builds a habit. And, by some magic, in the time between sessions, your brain keeps working. The scene you couldn’t figure out while staring at the screen has a way of untangling itself on a walk, driving, in the shower, or right before bed.
So, rest. Please. Unwind. Step away. Relax. Try your best not to overtrain. I know you have big goals. I know you’re writing a book you can’t wait for the world to see. But I want you to finish it.
Know your limits. Not as an excuse to go easy, but as a way to keep coming back.