Hey look! It’s a shiny Muse Monday! Throw a great ball at it!

*wiggle*

*wiggle*

*wiggle*

*CLICK*

Hey look at that! You caught a shiny Muse Monday! Congrats!

I’m mostly back on track with my various writings, but admittedly I had to take a media break. This is important as a writer.

Let me tell you why. (And why it’s here as a Muse Monday thing.)

A media break is where you take a break from writing to take in some other form of creative media. From binge-watching your new favorite show on netflix, to seeing that movie in theaters that you’ve been wanting to see, to just doing some pleasure reading – it’s all really useful for recharging your brain.

Even switching to another project for a while can help give you a break from your primary project.

Why is this important? Because eventually, you’re going to run out of the ability to create. Creativity is both a finite and an infinite resource. It’s like bamboo. It something that grows remarkably easily (and pretty prolifically), but you have to plant the seeds first.

Sometimes, this works as simply as switching to another project, or finding a creative prompt. Sometimes you’re more low on the creative juices than normal and just need the break.

Taking in new stories and new things helps your creativity, your muse, have a better and easier time coming up with new ideas. This means it will be easier and easier for you to knock out your word count goal every time you sit down to write. If your creativity is too tired or burnt out, you’ll eventually give up and you’ll no longer want to write.

So definitely take the time to recharge your creative battery. Plant the seeds of creativity and take a break.

I personally try to build in breaks into my schedule, specifically, I try to make sure that I get far enough ahead in my writing that I can take the weekends off. Treat writing like you would a job, where you have those breaks built in and you’ll discover that writing won’t tire you out as much as it once did.

My personal schedule, thanks to probably one of the most laid back jobs you can have, matches my work day literally. I work in an office where they don’t mind if I write in the down time. So I’m actually sitting in the office right now, busting out words with my portable wireless speaker sitting on top of the desk organizer and my laptop next to the primary computer. So far tonight, I’ve written nearly 1.8K words, and am relatively on track for 7k words in my shift. As a side effect of this awesome job, I have a lot of time to sit at my desk here and just write. So I’m working on getting into the habit of doing that, so that I can have my weekends free to do whatever I’d like. Which also includes reading for pleasure and just generally recharging my mind.

If you’re not lucky enough to have time to write on most days, then go ahead and make a schedule that you can keep to for writing, and guard your writing time fiercely. If you can get into the habit of doing it each time that you’ve set aside, eventually, you’ll have programmed your creativity into working best at those times. And your mind will have it’s recharge times built right into your schedule.

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So, take some time to recharge your muse, to make your muse better.