I’m sure there are people out there who began writing because they wanted fame and fortune (although I can’t imagine anyone who keeps writing because of all the loose fame and fortune laying around in publishing). Every writer I know, however, began writing for a couple of reasons:

1. They wanted to say something. Whether they wanted to tell stories, express emotions in poetry, or chart the course of whales, they wanted to make a piece of art that expressed something.
2. They wanted someone to receive that communication.

There are some writers who are happy writing private things, just for themselves, with nary another soul reading their work. In this case, I’d say they are communicating with themselves, the same way that people do with journals. But most writers want another person to read what they’ve written.

This can help us understand some of the causes of writing burnout. There’s a lot of ways to get burnt out as a writer, including all the ones that apply to other professions, such as working without adequate rest or without regard to other stressors. But the one we’ll consider today is lack of feedback. I don’t mean the kind of feedback where someone gives you compliments or critiques. I mean feedback as in a feedback loop.

Lots of things in humans are feedback loops. When my blood sugar drops, my body sends hormonal signals to cause the feeling of hunger. In response, I eat, and then as my blood sugar starts to stabilize, my hormones shut off “hunger” and switch on “satiety”. Satiety feels better than hunger, and I learn that if I eat, I’ll feel better.

You can think of a feedback loop in this sense, then, as experiencing the natural reward for the activity. The natural reward for an action is inherent in the action, while the secondary reward of an action can be social, financial, or otherwise made up by other people. For example, the secondary rewards of singing might include someone giving you a compliment, or attention, or even a contract to sing professionally. The natural rewards of singing are having fun and expressing your emotion. As long as you’re receiving the natural rewards of an activity, it’s a lot easier to keep doing the activity. Secondary rewards are nice, but they can’t sustain an activity by themselves.

In order to sustain our writing over time and keep ourselves healthy as writers, we have to ensure that we reap the natural rewards of writing, and prevent ourselves from exclusively chasing secondary rewards. (Not that you shouldn’t chase secondary rewards. Like I said, they’re very nice!) So what, then, are the natural rewards of writing?

Well, they’re not publication, fame and fortune, or compliments. Writing shares one natural reward with other forms of art: the satisfaction of taking a thing that exists only in your imagination and making it in reality. But I think this reward is always available to the writer—usually the only time lack of this reward contributes to writer burnout is, ironically, when the writer is successful enough to be asked to produce work that is commercially profitable but that the writer themselves feels scorn for. (This is not a knock on potboiler novels. But I think happy authors of potboilers are authors who don’t actively despise potboilers.)

The most potent natural reward of writing is what we mentioned above: communication.

After all, we chose writing as our art, not macrame or tap dancing or that thing where you build Buckingham Palace out of toothpicks. To know that you have readers, that your words are making people think and feel things, can motivate you even more than money.

This realization might invoke despair. Obviously you want readers. That’s why you’re trying to get published! Or, that’s why you’re trying to get published in a better magazine. Or, that’s why you’re trying to sell a novel. Or, that’s why you’re trying to sell a novel to a bigger publisher. (Are you sensing a theme?)

I suggest if you’re feeling disillusioned with writing, it might be because you aren’t experiencing the natural rewards. Try spending a set amount of time—a month? three months?—ensuring you get your writerly vitamins. Here is my prescription:

1. Make a piece of art that meets your own standards. Not someone else’s. Yours. That means this is the art you want to make, not what you think will sell, or what you think your mom would like, or what you wouldn’t be embarrassed for someone to see. Write something secret if need be, something just for you, but let it be exactly what you want to make.
2. Find your own Constant Reader. You only need one, but having 2-4 is better. You may, in turn, be their Constant Reader, but you’d be surprised how many times there are people who simply want to read your stuff. I have been very lucky to have found my long-running writing buddies on a website I’ve mentioned before, writing.com. I’ve also had relatives as readers, or local friends. The main point of the reading isn’t to get editing feedback, although it’s nice if that happens. It’s to ensure your brain experiences one of the natural rewards of writing: someone is reading your work. (You know they are, because they send you emails that say things like “YOU’RE EVIL!” when you end a chapter with a cliffhanger.)
3. Think about the things you’ve read that make you light up. The excellent stories, insightful history, helpful articles, meaningful poems. How many times have you reached out to the writer about those things? If the answer is “uh, never” don’t feel bad, but do mend your ways. Odds are, nowadays, that the writer has a website where you can submit a comment, or a publisher you can write to. Send a little note to that writer, and tell them what their work meant to you, even if you think it’s silly, even if you think you’re “bothering” them. I promise you’re not. Just send the note. When you get into practice, you may find yourself sending little notes at least once a week. There are a lot of writers doing good work. None of them believe anyone is reading their stuff.
4. Then think about how many stories, poems, or articles you’ve written and sent out into the world. Think about the readers that might be out there, afraid to bother you—just as you were afraid to bother the writer whose work you loved. Take heart.
5. Do it all again.

Your brain is a survival-oriented machine. It wants to do things that bring you rewards. It knows the difference between natural and secondary rewards. So if you want to be a writer for the long term, trick your brain. Reward yourself.