History That Never Was

Now that the videos from the 2026 WriteHive online conference are posted, I’ll be sharing some of those with quick summaries. This week, I’m talking about “Recovering Creativity After Burnout,” presented by Dianna Gunn.

As someone who hit the wall of burnout face first last year, this was an extremely valuable presentation for me to watch. Gunn talked about different types of burnout, which can sometimes be specific to a project but can also be generalized. She emphasized that figuring out the source of burnout can be valuable to determine how to recover from it–when it’s a specific project, sometimes it means putting it aside, but when it’s generalized, it requires a different process.

For generalized burnout, one suggestion she gave was that you may need to rebuild your entire process from the ground up. This filled me with dread as I thought about needing to do this, but it is true. My burnout was caused by overwork, and my personal tendencies are to go all in on whatever I’m working on. So even trying to work “a little” really meant that I start overworking again, on an already depleted tank, so I hit burnout even faster.

I also really loved the comment from one of the people who was also watching this presentation when it was “live,” which I wrote on a sticker (and then corrected when I looked back at my notes on this presentation). Author K.T. Moriarty had commented “Maintenance is a pre-requisite for productivity.” This also goes along with the idea of a depleted tank, in that you can’t be productive without any fuel, and in this case, that fuel is taking care of yourself, physically, mentally, and emotionally, in order to be able to be creative.

Finally, Gunn had three great suggestions for recovering your creativity, related to goals, breaks during creative stretches, and strict days off. I am AWFUL at the latter two, so I’ve been working on that since.

If you’re interested in this video, it runs about 56 minutes, and it’s available to watch on WriteHive’s YouTube channel!

Tags: advice, burn-out, convention, creativity, writehive, writing

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Wednesday, October 7th, 2026 at 6:00 am and is filed under Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.