Friday 8 February 2019

My homemade writing retreat: can I write a novel at home and not be distracted?



This is for all the writers who have ever despaired of having enough time and space to write at home, and who can’t go on a retreat. 

I’m part way through a novel. I have a first draft of 80,000 words, and 20,000 words of a much better second draft that I wrote last month. This post is about how I made space to write those 20,000 words, despite the odds - and mostly despite the reasons I gave myself for not writing them.

1: I apply for a writer's residency

I applied for a writing residency – a whole month in a Scottish castle cut off from the world*. It was a glorious thought that I might actually get to do this. It was also a terrifying thought, because what if I realised part way that I couldn’t write for a whole month? More importantly, what if there was a crisis at home and I wasn’t there to sort it out? 

These are stupid reasons to be afraid of a writing retreat. They are also excellent reasons to go on one.

Why are they stupid reasons? One, I am a professional writer - I write copy for my clients every day and have done for decades. Of course I can write every day. Two, I should get over myself. I am not the only person who can sort out crises, even if I think I am.

Anyway, it didn’t matter because I didn’t get the residency. 

2: Crisis: I don't get the residency

And what did I feel when I heard that I wouldn’t be retreating to that castle with my laptop and notes and nothing else to do but write?

I thought, I’ll never be able to finish my novel now.

I allowed myself to think this for a while. In a way, maybe it was comforting. It gave me a good reason for not finishing the novel I started five – yes, five – years ago.

Then I thought, but I like my novel. I think it could be good. It certainly is inside my head and some of the bits I’ve written already, I’m pretty pleased with. People whose opinions I value have liked what they read. (Not my mother-in-law, who demanded to see the first page, and put it down after one paragraph.) I know I can write the novel I have in my head and my notebooks, if only I have time and energy. 

Ah, there’s the drag. Time and energy. I don’t seem to have enough of either to write a novel. But who does? Other people write novels. They don’t all hang out in castles with food laid on and nothing else to do but write. We are not all Virginia Woolf with a room and an income and people who cook and clean.

Again, I told myself to get over myself. Be more Sarah, less Virginia.

Then I got realistic. I do struggle to write in amongst the morass of my daily life.

3: Real reasons I find it hard to write a novel


Creativity 

I write copy every day for a living, so by the evening the last thing I want to do is wiggle that mouse and get writing again.

I can hear you larks telling me to get up and write my novel before I start work. No. That is not an option. More on exhaustion later. 

Writing fiction is hard, much harder than writing copy. There are many days when I tell myself I’m not in the right mood to write fiction. I’ve learnt to ignore this voice. It’s a devil voice that does not have my best interests at heart. I can always write something. 

Time

Do I have enough of it? No, I don’t. I’m 55 and I don’t have time to waste. I’m not planning on being a one-novel wonder. I have things to say, think about, explore, and I don’t have time to lose.

On the other hand, there are meals to cook, friends and family to love, fields to walk. I volunteer half a day a week. I campaign for the Green Party. I grow vegetables. I read. They are all important to me. They all take time.

I also need time doing nothing in order to write; time when I think about what I’m going to write next; and time when I don’t think about it but am thinking about it on some other level. Without this, I begin to write clunky, emotionally empty words that merely move the plot on.

Family crises

Aren’t they a strong reason for not being able to write? Well, yes. They are. And there have been quite a few. They’re mostly other people’s crises, so I shan’t go into detail but they’ve been hospital serious, might not survive serious, and some have gone on for years. Some are still happening.

They have stopped me writing, though never completely. I can write poems in the thick of pretty much anything, and do because sometimes they’re the only way I make sense of pretty much anything. But it really isn’t possible to write a novel if you’re setting up care packages, or being alongside someone who is so ill they’re not sure how much they want to be here. Or at least it isn’t for me – maybe some people can power on through no matter what’s going on. I run out of mental and emotional energy.

Energy

I know I’m supposed to be so desperate to write this novel that I’ll sit up till three in the morning, night after night, weeping with exhaustion but determined to go on … but I’ve been that woman. More than 20 years ago I got ME, probably in part because I was that woman. These days, merely writing from 9 to 5 every day exhausts me. So, no I won’t write at dawn, nor into the night. If I do, I become too ill to write at all.

4: I make a decision to value my writing, because if I don’t …

When I didn’t get a place in that castle for a whole, glorious month, I allowed myself to feel sad (possibly even sorry for myself); and then I gave myself a talking to. If I didn’t think my novel was important enough to carve out time and space to write it, sure as hell no one else would. 

I told myself to value my writing. To stop talking about how important it is to me, and to do something about it. I decided to prove how much I care about being able to write by putting aside everything else and writing for a month. I'm sorry if I sound like a self-help book. I don't read them because they're so bloody annoying and self-satisfied. Feel free to be annoyed with me. But please bear with me.

I’m not so privileged that I can throw in my work for ever. I have to earn money to pay bills. But I had a long time away from work recently because I was ill and that taught me that I can become obsessed by the need to work before anything else.

I can also be obsessed with the idea that the people I love need me to be available at all times of the day or night. It’s possible that they think this too, but it isn’t true.

5: A radical plan to retreat and write for a month at home

I decided to retreat and write at home. After all, it’s warm, dry and has good armchairs and an excellent library. I like it here.

I took January off from work. I told all my clients that I wasn’t available – no, not even for a quick phonecall and no, not for any emails either. I’d be back in February. I was working on a huge, complex project and needed to concentrate. 

I told my family that I was only going to speak to them in the evenings and at weekends.

I told my friends that I’d see them in February. I turned down invitations. I turned down offers of cake.

I cleared my desk of all family admin (and when you have power of attorney for three people as well as your own household to run, that can be a fair pile of crap).

6: How did writing for a month at home go?

Well, not everyone completely understood the ‘I’m not talking to you this month’ thing straight away, but I was firm. By the end of the month, my phone was silent. My email ghostly.

My clients seemed – remarkably – to think it was cool that I was off writing a novel. They haven’t abandoned me.

And it was heaven. From the first day to the last – four glorious weeks – I wrote. I sorted out gaping plot holes. I talked to myself, worked out characters’ voices and quirks, found out how to write them, found my voice for this story.

I wrote 20,000 words in this new voice, from a new point of view, and those words are massively better than those of the first draft.

I didn’t feel lonely, despite seeing and speaking to pretty much no one. My husband – who doesn’t write and finds most of what I read, let alone write, mystifying – was my perfect companion. (I did see a sudden splurge of people on my mum’s 80th birthday, and it was lovely, but I was glad to be back writing the next day.)

I felt deeply happy. Deeply sure that I was doing something good and that I was right to be retreating from the world and writing.

Maybe surprisingly, it wasn't hard to write at home, despite the cornucopia of distractions around me. It hadn't been easy to set aside this month for writing and I knew it would end all too soon, so every day I was glad to write.

I dreaded the end of the month.

7: Three lessons learned from my home writing retreat

I’m back at work. I feared that on day one at my desk every client alive would wake up to my presence and clamour for my undivided attention. Again, get over yourself, Sarah. They were busy doing their own things. We’ve made plans for the weeks ahead. Work is coming in, but not in a deluge.

Take a break

On that first day, I tried writing the next scene of my novel after work, to keep up the momentum. It was no good. I wrote it but I was exhausted – almost certainly because a month of intensive writing was exhausting. I should know this by now but I’m a slow learner. Three days of feeling like a mouldy dishcloth later, I cut myself some slack and took a day off. I spent it at a friend’s funeral, but a day off writing was what I needed. Big lesson – I can take days off. This is a long haul, I can’t do it all without a break.

Edit as I go: that's the way I write

And that’s connected to another important lesson learned. I had hoped to finish the second draft in one month, but three weeks in I realised that I don’t write that fast. 

I felt bad about this but then I had some luck. I found out that I’m not alone. Not everyone churns out page after page in an unstoppable, fabulous flow.

I stopped reading fiction part way through the month and turned to my heap of unread magazines and journals. In a mslexia from 2016, Alison Moore said, ‘I need to know that what I’ve written so far is as right as I can get it. I have to tidy up as I go along, which is how I keep moving forwards as smoothly as possible; I don’t like the feeling that I’m leaving a bigger and bigger mess behind me.’ I love Alison Moore’s work, so if it works for her, that’s good for me too. 

It's ok to write slowly

In the same edition, the equally lovely writer Emma Healey said, ‘I write in 500 word bursts, working very intensely, then I run out of energy. It’s infuriating, because the book builds so slowly. But if I force myself to write more - if I’ve missed a day, for example, and try to catch up – then it’s useless.’ It was such a relief when I read that. I’d been beating myself up for being so slow. Surely I could do more, faster? No, I’ve learned that if I’m writing completely new words, 500 is pretty much my maximum too. More if I’m rewriting, maybe.

And one more lesson

There’s an irony here. I’m writing this blog post when I could be writing the novel. But that’s another thing I’ve learned. I live in the world, and while a month away from it is utterly wonderful, I can’t ignore the world forever. I’m no Salinger. (In lots of ways; I’m not comparing my writing to Salinger’s.)

But I will step back from the world a little. I’ll give myself time to think and write. I’ll spend less time working. Less time sitting about chatting. I won’t read anything that’s not worth reading. I won’t be blogging for a while. 

I will finish this novel.

*Hawthornden: lovely LitHub piece about Hawthornden's fellowships. They were quite right not to choose me – I sent work (not from this novel) that I didn’t love as an example of what I wanted to do better next time. Foolish me.