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 80^th 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.

How I finished the first draft of my novel

Yup, I finally finished the first draft. Here it is, emerging from the printer yesterday.

Note that you can't actually see the pages, and that's no accident - they're not ready for anyone to read yet. Not even me: I'm finding it hard to resist, but I've sworn to myself to put the script aside until after Christmas. By January I hope I'll come to it with less love and understanding, and can be as brutal as I need to be for the second draft.

It feels like I started this book a long, long time ago - possibly because I started thinking about it years before I wrote a word.

Then, over a year or two, I wrote a whole load of words that I deleted straight away. I couldn't work out where my story was going or who would tell it.

So in September 2015, I booted myself into action on the 12-week online course at the Unthank School. This was intense - especially as I was working pretty flat out at the time - but I committed to writing something every day for those twelve weeks, and I did. Sometimes I only managed 20 minutes while the potatoes boiled for dinner, but I always wrote. I mapped out my plot, got to know my main characters, wrote 5,000 words, rewrote them completely, in a new voice and from a new point of view, and by the end of December I had over 15,000 words.

Maybe I'm a wimp, but after Christmas, I collapsed a little bit. I confess I didn't have the steam to keep on writing every day.

And I was beginning to find it hard to dive into the novel and clamber straight out again before my hair was even wet. (I promise I use better metaphors than that in the novel.)

But I did keep on writing in the nooks and crannies of my life and by the early summer I had almost 55,000 words. The end was in sight, but I really, really wanted to write the rest in one go, not in little bits and pieces.

I booked August off (I'm self-employed so that meant telling precious clients I wouldn't be around, and earning nothing for four weeks - no small deal). But I spent most of it sorting out care for a beloved aunt. To make myself feel a tiny bit better I skidaddled off to Hastings on my own for four days of nothing but writing, and was briefly very happy. Then I returned to my desk and wrote almost nothing of the novel for a couple of months.

I was deeply frustrated, and felt that my novel and I were in danger of falling out of love. I knew I had to immerse myself in it, but daily life (mine at least) just doesn't allow for immersion.

So I booked myself onto a writers' retreat - ten days in Spain, at Casa Ana - and told myself that I'd write and write while I was there, and that if it was humanly possible, I'd finish before I came home.

And I did. Casa Ana turned out to be perfect for me: high in the mountains of the Alpujarra, remote, silent, almost empty. My fellow writers were warm and generous, we were mollycoddled from dawn till dusk, and everyone was there to work: it was easy to write all day, from before breakfast till dinner in the evening. (And the food was wonderful!)

I'd been afraid I wouldn't be able to write for more than a couple of hours a day, because at home that's all I seem to have the stamina for. But Casa Ana proved that if I have no responsibility other than to writing, I can focus completely on it without feeling the need to run away. I didn't stick to my desk all that time - I walked every day, and I lay on my bed and thought about my characters and what was happening to them. But I didn't think about anything else. It was heaven. And I finished the first draft at five o'clock on my last day. The ending's a bit shonky but that's ok, it's a first draft and I know I can make it better.

So I'm happy. But I'm also feeling a bit flat - I'm missing being inside my story, and I'm sort of hesitating about celebrating because I know I haven't finished really. But I'll be back with the novel soon enough, and I'm pretty sure I've done the hard part. (Could be beginner's naivety, but I'm feeling positive so don't pop my balloon, please.)

And in the meantime, I'm celebrating a little bit. Here's the piece of jewellery by Kara that I bought this time last year. I promised myself I'd only wear it when I'd completed the first draft. It's heavy on my arm, and I love it. Now it's reminding me of the work I still have to do, and I can't wait.

Do creative writing courses work?

There's been a lot of bad press about creative writing courses recently, and I have to say that I sometimes agree: doing a course is no substitute for getting down to work and putting words on the page.

You don't need a course to be a great writer, obviously. Equally, just doing a creative writing course doesn't make you a decent writer.

But, but, but ... twenty years ago or so, I signed up for a creative writing BA at my local university, taught by Susan Wicks. I was a book editor and had never written more than teenage drivel before, and it was a transformative experience: among much else I wrote poems that weren't awful, comedy dialogue that was, and discovered that I wasn't at all bad at writing copy. I'd assumed everyone could do it if they tried, but it turns out they can't.

I dropped out of the course because I was about to have my second child and was working more or less full time, and simply couldn't pack in a weekly writing assignment.

A little while later, though, emboldened by what I'd learned, I gave up editing and became a copywriter.

I didn't write any more poems because I was rather busy, and not always very well and the copywriting took up all my creative juices. But another few years later, Sue asked if I'd like to join a small writing group that she was tutoring.

I wrote my first short story for that group. I'd written lots of opening lines before, but always lost my nerve before finishing them. Now I had a group demanding to know what happened, so I just had to plough on to that final line.

Now I might have written that story without the group - the bones of it had been inside me for ages, and I read widely and reasonably critically so I had an idea of how a story might go. But I would never have sent it out. It wouldn't have occurred to me that it might be good.

Sue told me to send it out, so I did because I trusted her judgement. It was rejected and she told me to try again, and The Warwick Review accepted it, and then Nick Royle asked to include it in that years' Best British Short Stories. I was stunned.

I stayed in the writing group for quite a while because it was a great place to try out new ideas on a supportive group of people, and the writing exercises taught me all sorts of skills and approaches it might have taken me years to unwrap on my own.

In the end, though, I decided to go it alone: I found I was writing for the group - neat little nuggets of fiction that would fit into the time allotted - and not for me.

I wrote more stories, a handful of poems, and a play. I learned to use my own judgement, to try new approaches, to take risks.

And I began to gather notes for a novel. I did research, I sketched characters, I wrote a trillion opening lines. And I never went further. Each time I started, I got scared and put it all back in the box and did something else. I wanted to get it right so much that I couldn't bear to get it wrong, and I needed to get it wrong to find out what was right.

So in September this year I signed up for the How to Write a Novel course with Stephen Carver at the Unthank School. It's an online course, just 12 weeks long, and it was exactly what I needed.

It's structured and demanding: we looked at openings, endings, character, voice, plot, themes,  perspective, pace, dialogue, descriptive writing, and more. We dived straight in: look at these openings, which work for you? Why? Choose a couple of books you like and examine their openings in detail. Now write five possible opening lines for your novel. What do the rest of the students reckon? Pick one and take it further ...

There was no time to draw breath, to allow doubt to creep in. I wrote lines, scenes, monologues, dialogues. I sketched out a plot, finally, and then drew it in more detail. I worked out why I wanted to write this story so much and threw a whole load of unnecessary stuff out.

And every single day I wrote a bit more of my novel. Up at the top of this entry is the current word count. As you can see, I'm a slow writer, but I've discovered that if I write about 500 words a day I make tangible progress. I can even write this many words on a day when I have no spare time - I can write them while the potatoes boil if it comes to it. I can always rewrite them. In fact I've already rewritten the whole thing, changing it from a third to a first person narrative. I've learned to play, make mistakes, not to worry. I've had huge fun.

I chose the Unthank School course for pragmatic reasons: it focussed on the novel, was online, flexible and short. It was amazingly good value. I didn't know Stephen but I learned long ago that having a big name tutor doesn't guarantee that a course will be good: how many famous writers can be bothered to create really great materials, week after week, and deliver them ego-free?

So thanks to all the tutors and fellow students I've worked with! I'm off to finish my novel now.

Writing a novel: I need new shoes

I'm about to write my first novel. And my shoes are in a sad state.

These two things are connected.

My shoes are wrecked after two years of walking in them almost every day. I walk because it keeps me sane, and because it's often the only way I can think of the next line I'm going to write. Most of the time the next line is copy for a client. Sometimes, though, I'm trying out a storyline, or some dialogue.

On the day I took this photo - just last week - we'd just scrambled down Pillar, an especially steep mountain in the Lake District. We'd reached the top in a 40 mile-an-hour wind and hail and ate our lunch huddled behind a stone wall. Then we scraped our way down to the valley, a rock fell on me, and we squelched through miles of bog when the path vanished. We carried on, because what else can you do? You have to get to the end of the path somehow.

This week I've begun to write a novel, and I suspect it's going to feel like that walk on Pillar - exhilarating when the clouds lift for a moment, revealing the glorious views and the rush of being up so high, but for the most part simply gruelling.

This novel has been waiting in my mind for years. It's time to quit fussing, admit I don't need new shoes, just a whole load of determination, and get writing.

(I've signed up for the Unthank School online novel writing course - if I ever come up for air, I'll let you know how it's going, but don't hold your breath. Or is it me who's holding her breath? I'm dazed and confused already.)