The End of Summer and a Day Off
Labor Day is the unofficial end of summer and a well-earned day off. It also honors working people, and writers do some of the most invisible labor there is.Share on X
Labor Day falls on the first Monday in September. For most of us it marks the unofficial end of summer, the last barbecue, the last long weekend before the year gets serious again.
That’s mostly how I treat it. A day off, a break, a marker that summer is closing out. There’s no point pretending otherwise, and there’s nothing wrong with it. A day of rest is the entire idea, and resting on it is the correct way to observe it.
But the holiday started as something more specific. It was created to honor working people and the labor that built the country, the kind of work that often goes unseen and unthanked. That part is worth a moment, because writing is exactly that kind of work.
The Most Invisible Job There Is
A book takes months. The reader sees the finished thing and never the months. Writing is real labor, and almost all of it happens where no one can see it.Share on X
Here’s the writing angle, and it’s a real one. Writing is labor, and it’s some of the most invisible labor there is.
A reader sees a finished book. They don’t see the months it took, the bad first drafts, the rewrites, the days spent fixing a single chapter that still didn’t work. They see the clean result and never the work that produced it. That’s true of most ghostwriting especially, where the entire point is that the labor disappears and only the client’s name remains. The work is real, hard, and sustained, and almost none of it is visible.
That’s the connection to Labor Day that matters to me. The holiday honors the work nobody sees, and writing is full of exactly that.
The finished page looks effortless, the surest sign that a lot of effort went into it. Anyone who has tried to write something good knows it’s work, even when it looks like it wasn’t.
How do you spend Labor Day?
Rest. That’s the right answer, and I’m not going to talk you out of it.
The day exists to honor work by stepping away from it for one afternoon, so take the afternoon. If you’re a writer, give yourself permission to not write for once, because rest is part of the work too. Burned-out writers don’t produce good pages. And if you want to mark the spirit of the day, take a second to appreciate the invisible labor behind the things you use, including the books you read, every one of which represents months of work you never saw.
Then close the laptop and enjoy the long weekend. You earned it.