“Above all, write. Every. Single. Day."
That sentiment is a staple of writing advice everywhere. After all, writing is a skill. It's something that requires practice to see improvement and growth. A muscle that can atrophy if not exercised for extended periods of time.
But there are risks involved with never wanting to stop, even when circumstances are begging you to. And the greatest among them lies in the opposite extreme of atrophy: burnout.
2024 was a terrible year. At the end of 2023, I developed a medical issue that, while thankfully not life threatening, quickly advanced from painful to debilitating. I was told it would require surgical intervention. The path from that initial consultation to an actual surgery date stretched throughout the following year.
In the midst of being pushed around from doctor to doctor, my laptop; which was already a hand-me-down from my brother, began to fall apart. That same week, the battery of my seven-year-old phone started to die on me.
On top of all that, in May of 2024, my city flooded. I was forced to evacuate my home in the middle of the night. Although I am very lucky I had a home to return to within a couple of weeks, the experience was nothing short of traumatic.
Through all of this—the medical issues, the natural disasters, the device difficulties—I was writing for a web serial that was, and still is, my personal pet project. Entering the drafting stage was my reward for two years of almost nonstop worldbuilding and plotting. Something I was beyond excited to finally bring to fruition.
I wrote on my phone, while trying to purchase the best computer I could afford with the money I scrounged up. In the waiting room between doctor's appointments and endless pre-op exams. While trying to not feel like an inconvenience, sitting on a friend's couch and waiting to hear it was safe to go home. I was proud of not taking any breaks through all of that. I felt good about still being able to make progress on a writing project that was so important to me.
And up until October of 2024; until the very morning of my scheduled surgery, I continued to work on it without fault.
However, that stress was compounding. After I finally had my surgery and was cleared to recover at home, my mental health took a gigantic dive. Recovery was a lot more painful and lot slower than I had been anticipating. I had two to three months of weekly doctor visits ahead of me on top of the year long prodding I'd already endured. I was on a lot of medication. I didn't want to do much of anything, and whenever I tried to force myself into any sort of writing productivity, everything felt wrong, like I was trying to speak with someone else's voice. I grew resentful of my own efforts. I felt I was doing my own story a disservice. So, for the first time in about three years, I forced myself to accept I desperately needed a break and stopped working on the serial.
Enter a little side project.
In early 2023 I had introduced a friend to my favorite video game series: Dragon Age, and playing through the games together on Discord had been one of the highlights of all the horrible times I had, especially while waiting for diagnosis and treatment. Knowing that I'm a writer, and becoming way too invested in our game protagonists, she started insisting I should write some fan fiction. A notion I fought against tooth and nail.
Something about fan fiction had always felt intimidating to me. If the world and characters are my own, I'm the basis for what is canon and what is in character. Touching someone else's creation made me nervous in general, but doubly so with a game and cast of characters that meant so much to me.
However, late one night, caving under peer pressure and sleepless boredom, I decided to write a few paragraphs. And there they sat, to maybe be picked at in between my more important work.
Dragon Age: Origins is my favorite game of all time. It is mostly responsible for my immense love of RPGs and has been extremely influential in how I approach character writing ever since I first played it in 2011, but I can't say I ever really participated in fandom. Or wanted to. But the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard only a few days into my recovery sent me into a replay spiral of the whole series and in my state of pent up creative energy, I latched on to that unfinished document as a form of release.
And it was everything I didn't even know I needed.
Dipping a toe into fan fiction was my writing equivalent of dancing like nobody's watching. It removed the stress of world and lore building, forced me out of my comfort zone by giving well-established characters my own interpretation while keeping their voices and personalities intact. It provided me with new ways to enjoy replaying my favorite games while thinking of how to convey certain game mechanics, character abilities, and quest lines in ways that would be narratively sound. It kept me mentally engaged in my craft without the self-imposed pressure associated with my original work.
It made 2025 a much better year.
It is now 2026. It's been over a year spent primarily fic writing. And something that started as a private little thing became a gateway to actually engaging in fandom for the first time ever, building new friendships, finding joy again in the act of creation.
I am still far from recovered from the mental, emotional, and financial toll that one bad year took on me, but taking this time to work on something different has allowed me to take risks I might not have dared to take, taught me skills I might have never learned otherwise, and spared me from the pain of stagnation. I'm not sure when I'll fully return to working on my serial. And the guilt of writing something else all this time has been real and ever present.
But I am hopeful that I'll be able to return to a place where I can enjoy creating in that world again without associating it with some of the lowest points of my life. Free of the overwhelming pressure I currently still feel.
I think laying everything out in this post has been another good step in that direction.
I know that the concept of shifting gears due to burnout isn't particularly groundbreaking. In fact, it's advice I brushed past many times before myself. It's advice many of us will ignore until the moment we realize we need it. I think burnout may just be an inevitability for many of us.
I'm not writing this as a cautionary tale, I'm writing it for the purpose of commiseration. And because I do think it's worth emphasizing the value of engaging in your art or craft just for the fun of it. It is much too easy to neglect our own needs and own reasons for creating in the process of working on larger, more ambitious projects, or when writing for a readership.
Especially now when being able to experience joy in one's art can feel like an uphill battle against the relentless dehumanization of artists in all forms and the constant need to express resistance. We are constantly told that we should continue to create—that it’s more important now than ever—without being given the tools for coping with the pressure this creates.
It's important to find the part of you that's fueled by nothing more than pure self-indulgence, and to give that part of you the space to exist.
Whatever form that takes.
Blackbird is a web serial and fan fiction writer, and freelance translator by trade, from Porto Alegre, Brazil. Her hobbies include video games, music, and rambling incessantly online about her current hyperfixations relating to video games and music. Which today happen to be Dragon Age, Slime Rancher, and Starset.
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