I didn’t plan on taking a break from blogging. Sometimes things just happen. There’s been a number of critical events in my life recently, including the passing of a friend, the death of a much beloved cat, broken promises concerning my writing, and a much too recent series of public attacks on a writing forum where nobody supported me and the moderators did nothing to stop it – all of this conspired to almost make me give up.
I think what I needed was a break, to get my life back into focus. My faith and my marriage are the two strongest things in my life, and they serve as the bedrock I stand on. I preloaded my social media manager (Recurpost) to the max, and took as much time as I could away from social media. I left the writer’s forum. All of my focus went into my private life, and I feel I can say I made it through the dark night.
Benefit one
Renewed focus. I’m able now to look at my blog and see what people have been interested in. I’m able to switch gears now and focus on what needs to be written. Getting my SEO done can wait a little longer. Let me get back to what’s important – writing and blogging.
Benefit two
Examining my work process. I’ve had a while to get away from my novels, and now I can examine them with a more critical eye. I can more easily do what needs done with my novels, identify what’s wrong with the unfinished ones, and find the balance I need between the easygoing blogging style I prefer and the “pro blogger” style everyone says you need to have to be successful at blogging.
Benefit Three
Healing. Oh, I took some hits, especially emotionally. I haven’t done any work on movie scripts since 2018, after everything fell apart in that department. I really thought I was close, that close, to a sale that would have led to relocating back home and being able to write for a living. All the promises fell flat. I needed distance from the writing forum, and leaving it was the best decision I could ever have made. Shutting down for a while also allowed me to get past the loss of my cat (his photograph and a plaster cast of his footprint sit above my writing desk).
Nothing can deal with the personal tragedies in my life that also occurred. Only time heals those wounds. You have to patiently wait for the one year anniversary of those wounds, so they can finally close and start to heal. I think this year will be better to see the publishing of my first three novels than my earlier goal of last year.
Benefit Four
Maturity as a writer. There’s some stages you go through as a writer, after you finish your first novel. You go through a period where you churn out novels left and right. Then you hit the magic number of words written versus words edited, and suddenly you know what to leave OUT when writing a novel. I sometimes wish there was three NaNoWriMo events a year so I could make a dent in the backlog of novels I still have to write.
Benefit Five
More patience. I now have blogged since 2017 as a writer. I’ve had a Twitter presence since then as well. I can settle into a routine, and that’s what it requires to be a writer that produces output – routine. That’s why the experts tell you to write at the same time of day in the same place, and why they tell you to have a dedicated writing space. I’ve had all that, and now it seems more like I can work more efficiently. I think another thing that helped productivity wise was streamlining my process. I liked Buffer, but it had a crippling amount of posts you could schedule on the free plan, and their premium plan – like Hootsuite – was far too expensive for benefits given. Doing all of my social media work on Recurpost was the best decision I could make.
Summary
Quitting means you never win. But sometimes you just need to pull back, regroup, get back to the basics. Remember why you’re doing all of this in the first place. And when you’re ready to return (if you did it right), you’ll find everything is so much easier than before.
Would a temporary break help you or hinder you?
