If you're dealing with writer's block or burnout right now, psst: your problem is not "motivation," it's metabolic cost

To understand what is wrong with our brains, let us learn from Kingdom Plantae.

Volunteering for the American Chestnut Foundation in my off hours has been a real boon for the day job. Every time I hang out with TACF scientists, I pick up a new forestry concept perfectly suited to the kind of sweeping, anthropomorphized, scientifically dubious life metaphor in which I specialize as a literary agent and developmental editor.

Case in point: metabolic cost. Foresters are obsessed with this one, particularly as it pertains to American chestnuts and fungal blight. Trees not killed by the blight must contend with the metabolic cost of resisting it—i.e., they have to expend extra energy. Forming the necessary callous tissue requires them to invest some Tree Zhuzz they might have otherwise invested into healthy growth and development.

Meanwhile, the Darling 58—an interventionist variety of American chestnut equipped with a single wheat gene, lending it wheat’s ability to neutralize killer blight acid—must contend with the metabolic cost of such internal antacid manufacture. Unlike their wild-type siblings, in other words, Darling 58s now have the machinery of survival on their shop floor. This is a good thing, profoundly so; IMO, such gift-giving represents the pinnacle of what human beings are here on Earth to do.

Still: the trees themselves are in charge of running this new machinery humans have given them. Doing so takes energy, and that energy has to come from somewhere: light, water, nutrients in the soil. There’s a metabolic cost.

OK—what on Earth does any of this have to do with me or my writing career?