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Can You Help This Freelance Writer Recover from Burnout?

Carol Tice

I spend a lot of time on this blog helping writers figure out how to find more and better clients.

Today, let’s look at a problem on the other side of the spectrum.

One writer recently emailed me with her tale of woe — she is overloaded with work and falling out of love with writing:

“How do you handle extreme burnout in freelance writing? I am going through that now and am floundering with my writing. My quality of writing has gone way down. I have been fighting this with a purple passion, but my work is suffering.

“Another problem is that I lost my major client last Friday due to the economy and my boss’s subsequent layoff. I am so turned around I don’t know what to do. Any advice would clearly be appreciated. I don’t want to leave my writing, but I am so burned out that I am not providing quality work.”–Teresa

This is definitely a bad situation. Makes me wonder whether that layoff was really because of “the economy,” because we all know what happens when you’re burned out.

You get fired from some of your better gigs. Suddenly, instead of burnout being the worry, it’s starvation.

It’s become a tradition for me to throw at least one holiday-time mailbag question to my great readers to answer, so I’m turning this one over to you. I can’t wait to see your tips!

Can you help this writer avoid burnout? Leave your advice in the comments.

P.S. Congrats to Becca, who won a free ticket to the upcoming Freelance Writers Den bootcamp, How to Use Social Media to Get Freelance Gigs. Get details on this training by clicking below:

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