Coming back from my own hiatus (and making a few updates to the site’s theme and appearance), I’m writing to let you know the benefits of ‘taking a break’.
Hustle culture has demonized ‘breaks, hiatuses, and vacations’ to the point where enjoying yourself seems blasphemous because you’re not ‘productive’.
I once even watched a YouTube video where someone realized there was something wrong with the five-day traditional work week and somehow arrived at the conclusion that we need to make Saturday a workday…
This applies to any job, but first and foremost I give writing advice, and in the writing space, we all hit ‘that wall’ sooner or later, that wall that seems to stop and block all progress we make on our writing, our editing, our proofreading, our querying, perhaps our overall motivation.
Therefore, I’d like to dispel a few ‘myths’ about the hiatus and talk more about the real art of it.
A hiatus is ‘lazy’
Anything but, really. Is a computer lazy for having to power off every once in a while? Close tabs due to low memory, clear space for optimal performance? Probably a moot question when computers are not people, but are our brains not all too different from computers? There was once a time when people were referred to as computers as a vocation! Those were the days.
The topic of laziness is one where a thousand myths lie, and I couldn’t possibly dive into it all, but there’s nothing lazy about needing a break from over-exhaustion, overworking, and life in general. There’s a reason people take ‘fasts’, from food, from social media, from drinking or other pleasures, from whatever it is they do beyond the recommended moderation.
When we fast, we teach our body to go without something. It’s perhaps the oldest and most effective form of discipline humans still practice, and it’s so effective because it maintains a mental form of our body’s most natural tendency, homeostasis.
"Everything in moderation, including moderation"Oscar Wilde
The other thing about fasting, mentally, you come back with even more refreshing payoff. When you write a book, let’s say fiction, and fail to finish a scene, hit a wall mid-chapter, when you take a hiatus, you can always come back to that scene later with a fresh mind and perspective.
Most times when this happens for me, I end up scrapping the scene, and rewriting an even better one.
Remember when people harped on Bill Gates for saying he’d hire a lazy person because they’d find an easier way to do the job? Well, here’s more evidence in support of that.
Taking a hiatus will worsen the quality of your work
This probably isn’t really a myth as I’ve seen it far less often than the others, and most writers I know don’t write a book in one sitting!
But some authors insist that a book should be written at least within a certain time frame, and that ‘gap years’ in writing are a big no-no. But this isn’t necessary true.
Mark Twain took numerous years in between writing Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
While yes, it is noticeable where he took those pauses and where he picked it back up, the quality of the writing was still virtually unaffected, as both those works are still regarded as a foundational crux of US literature and still read in English classes to this day.
There’s also more to pulling off a successful hiatus. Much like how it’s counter-productive and anachronistic to “plan your next vacation while on your vacation” like a lot of Type-A personalities have been prone to do, during a successful hiatus, you don’t think about work, at all.
Maybe you can strum up new scenes in your head that may be good for your book, maybe, but if you dwell too much and spend too long thinking about the editing, the proofreading, the querying, and the stress of it all, you haven’t truly stepped away.
Now for the workaholics, it may longer for you to do so, much like how an alcoholic still thinks about his next drink even when in recovery at the beginning, but generally you are the ones who require the even longer vacations to truly de-stress and unwind.
Bottom line, if you need to take that hiatus from work, this is your green light to do so. See some results for yourself.
Donovan Levine | Agent, Writer, Copyeditor 
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