Hi Reader,

I hope you love your story. I hope you love writing it, revising it, turning it over in your mind. I hope ideas spark when you’re in the shower and on a walk and cooking dinner and driving to work.

In short, I hope your story is the thing you want to escape to, not the thing you want to escape from.

That’s how I feel about the stories I work with. And they’re not even my stories!

Yesterday morning, I began recording a new-to-me episode format for Your Next Draft. It’s a behind-the-scenes “week in the life” episode, where every day this week I’ll check in in the morning and evening to let you know what I’m working on and how it goes.

Gotta be honest—it’s a pretty vulnerable kind of episode for me. Do I share my work hours and the breaks I do (or don’t) take? Do I admit that sometimes I work 11-hour days? Do I try to time the week I share for a week when I might work more “reasonable” hours, even if that week is, er, less representative of my norm?

These questions are thrown into sharp relief in the context of a podcast I’m recording to share publicly. But they’re not new. I’ve been wrestling with them personally and with coworkers and friends since the day I launched my business and went full-time into editing in 2022.

What is “work/life balance”?

How do you take a break from the thing you love doing . . . when the thing you love doing is what you want to do when you’re taking a break?

When do you pour more time and energy into the work, and when do you draw a boundary and step back?

For me, the word is “work,” because story is my job.

For you, the word is “writing,” or “editing,” or “revising,” because story is your passion.

(If it’s not already abundantly clear, story is my passion, too.)

There are times when I work [edit] for 11 hours to the exclusion of other things I love because deadlines are looming and the work must get done, and it takes every drop of creative energy I have in me and leaves me wrung out, in desperate need of rest.

And there are times when I work [edit] for 11 hours because I love the work so much and I don’t want to walk away, and when I finally set it down, I struggle to fall asleep because my mind is spinning with ideas and I can’t wait to do it all again the next day.

There’s no singular right answer here.

And honestly? That is the foundation of all great stories.

Great stories present us with a tension between values with no clear, singular, universally “right” answer. Sometimes, prioritizing one value is the better choice. And sometimes, prioritizing the other value is the better choice.

It all depends on the specific details of an individual’s situation, the goals they’re pursuing, and the values that matter most to them in that context.

In other words: sometimes, your best choice is to keep writing. And sometimes, your best choice is to walk away.

Is today a day when you should keep going? Or is today a day when you should draw a line and take a break?

I can’t answer that for you.

What I can tell you is this:

Last weekend, I took a full two days off. I edited zero books, and I opened my editor and book coach group chats and forums only like three or four times all weekend. (Hey, I can’t just never think about story.)

Instead of editing, I spent two wonderful days with friends, potting plants and wandering around botanical gardens and eating ice cream and catching up on each other’s lives.

I never traveled more than 25 minutes away from my house. And yet it felt like an entire vacation, a complete context switch, restful and restorative and reinvigorating.

On Friday night, when I picked up my computer to edit a couple podcast episodes for fun, “keep going” was the right answer. My other option that night was to sit on my couch and watch TV, and while there are a lot of great shows out there, I just really wanted to relisten to the awesome interview I’d held earlier that week.

And on Saturday and Sunday, when I set it all aside and focused on my friends, “take a break” was the right answer. Friends I hadn’t seen in years were coming to visit, and I didn’t want to miss a minute with them.

The piece that made the weekend feel like a vacation, that made setting story down feel worth it, is that I filled the time with other things I value as deeply as I value storytelling. I filled the time with friendships that matter to me and time outside with living things. And ice cream, of course.

It all comes back to the tension between values—the value of storytelling, and the value of friendship. The passion I love, and the people I love.

The story you love, and all the other things that keep your life going and bring you purpose and meaning and joy.

I don’t love story any less for having taken a two-day vacation. In fact, I’m itching to get back into it.

And if I find myself working another late night tonight, you can bet it’ll be because I’m so energized and excited that I can’t bring myself to put story down.

How about you? Is it time to lean in, or time to step back? Is the answer the same today as it was yesterday? Will it change tomorrow?

There’s no singular answer here, only the one that’s right for you, right now.

Whatever you choose, your story will always be waiting, ready for you to escape to it whenever you need.

Happy editing,

Alice

P.S. This is a subtle story structure lesson. What question does your protagonist face that has no singular right answer, but a variety of possible "good" choices depending on the context, their goal, and their values?
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