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.

In the dark, time has a different shape: Halloween thoughts

I'm writing this sitting by the woodstove, it's dark outside, the winter's cold is coming, though the wind has stilled, and the day is almost over. I've been reading Sarah Moss's new novel, Ghost Wall, set out on the moors of Northumbria where ancient people made sacrifices in the peat bogs and I'm glad to be indoors. It's Halloween and not a night to be out among the spirits.

I'm not superstitious, but there's a strange change in the way I feel about being out when the light falls early. I was up on the Ashdown Forest this afternoon - it's not a forest in the modern sense, but high open heathland with vast views to both the North and South Downs. The Forest feels as if it goes on forever, though it's only about ten square miles, but it rises above all the surrounding farmland and villages so when I'm up there I feel as if I'm in another world.

By the time I parked at Old Lodge it was almost 3.30 and the sun was already low. I didn't hurry, but when the light began to fade I turned back. The Forest may be small, but it's easy to find yourself further from home than you thought, and when it's dark the heathland feels enormous.

All the time I was there I saw no one, though I could hear cars along the High Road. I saw a buzzard, crows, ponies grazing, a black deer that watched me from a stand of Scots pines. The ground was still dry from the long hot summer, the heather scratchy on my shins when I left the path to explore a lump that might have been a tumulus.

There were iron age people here, before the Romans. They left their marks in hill forts and tracks and burial mounds. When I was a teenager I spent weeks up here excavating one fort, found an ancient nutshell in the midden beyond the fort's walls, post holes, stones carefully laid, the residues from smelting. I smoked my first cigar in the Hatch Inn, drove madly down and off the Forest to collect my A level results, and back to celebrate my leaving.

We were a practical lot, archaeology being almost entirely manual labour - digging, scraping, barrowing huge amounts of spoil. And we lived on site, camping where the Romans must have lain when they arrived, laughing about the legionnaire who walked the walls, whom no one saw or believed in.

It was easy to laugh when it was light, or sat round the fire close together, the Forest invisible beyond our circle of crackling light and heat. But on the long walk up the road from the pub, with no street lights, no houses, no torches, it felt different. It was dark, truly and deeply dark, and time seemed somehow fluid, as if all the people who had ever been here might still be walking among us.

It's a luxury to experience dark like that.

Sometimes, I wait till late, when no one else will be out wandering and I walk away from the lights of the village and into the dark of the woods. If there is no moon I can barely see the trees, except where they are silhouetted against the faint orange glow from the town, so I turn away and walk south and once again I can feel the strange lightness of true dark.

It has no weight, it is limitless. I am untethered and invisible within it. There is nothing to fear.

When life feels complicated ...

Three fields from my house is a fallen oak. This vast exposed root it all that's left of its hundreds of years of bending in storms, drinking up rain, reaching up to spring sun, drying out in mid-summer heat, sending out thousands of leaves every spring, letting go every autumn, feeling the old leaves rejoining it slowly through the soil, dropping the branch that lightning struck, resisting the beetles and the woodpecker that followed them, reaching out to its companion - an oak its equal in size just along the field path, sharing knowledge and maybe joy, knowing this is the year to make acorns and smother the ground in them, feeling a new tree emerge and start to talk through its roots, hearing the buzz of thousands of insects, the craak of the crows in its top, and finally, very slowly, coming to an end.

This is the oak I used to pass, and it's still glorious in its complexity, its strength and its uniqueness.

One day I want to be an oak.

PS The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben changed my understanding of oaks and all other trees for ever.

PPS Van Gogh definitely looked long and hard at a dead oak root.

Things I'm not growing out of

A little while ago my Mum and my hairdresser laughed at me (we've known each other a long time).  They thought I was mad because I was excited about going camping in Cornwall.

My Mum said she grew out of camping long ago. My hairdresser loathes all thought of it.

Fair enough, but this summer I've been rediscovering the things I love to do, and they're making me quite inordinately happy. (I wasn't well last summer. Being confined to the sofa made me realise how much I missed these things.)

They don't seem childish to me, and I wonder why we're supposed to grow out of them? Who on earth wants to be grown up if it means no more ...

waking as the sun warms your tent and a robin is singing only three feet above your head

taking your canoe down the river on a sunny day and watching the world float by

lying in a meadow among the flowers and butterflies, hearing nothing but grasses and bees

swimming in the river before breakfast, swallows in the air just above me, fish invisible in the water below.

 If that's being grown up, I think I'll take my time getting there. It's time for a swim ...

The Wild Garden: an unexpected poem in a window

Last month Sarah Salway , poet and writer and bringer together of poets and writers, asked me to write something for the Poetry Trail she created for the inaugural Tunbridge Wells Poetry Festival. 

Sarah paired nineteen local poets with nineteen shops in the old part of the town, giving me the Oxfam Bookshop because I volunteer there for an afternoon each week. It's fertile soil for a poet, with a wonderful collection of customers, and an incredibly idiosyncratic mix of books. 

(Show me a town's charity bookshop and I'll show you its soul. It may not be what you expect.)

I didn't know what I'd write - character sketches don't come easy to me; wit neither. On my next shift I pulled The Wild Garden at random off the Old and Interesting shelf behind the till purely because I liked the colour of its cover. I opened it and the inscription on the fly leaf gave me a little shiver - here was a treasure shared between friends more than a hundred years ago.

The title page sounded a little dry, though:

But the author's preface was pure joy, and my poem was begun.

As ever, the poem was a surprise to me - I never know what's in my head until it appears on the page. I wrote most of it quite quickly over the following week, and edited it among the spring wild flowers of Cornwall:

A week later I came home to see my poem in the window of the Oxfam Bookshop, surrounded by flowers, books about gardens and books of poetry, and felt deeply honoured. I saw people all over the place peering into shop windows at poems of all kinds, and it made me very happy - even happier when I sold two poetry books out of our window in my first hour back in the shop.  

Solitude and writing in Paris

I've just spent a week in Paris, alone, writing and not-writing, and it was difficult and wonderful in equal measure.

I normally write pretty much anywhere I happen to be: I write in my office and in my kitchen, on trains and planes, in libraries and cafés. I'm not bothered by noise much, and I've written stuff I'm proud of while sat alongside my family watching television. So I don't need silence or solitude to write.


But Paris gave me a whole week alone, and I'd been longing for it. It felt wantonly extravagant, and essential.

It was harder than I remembered to be so alone. I spoke to almost no one except to buy coffee and food and one day I didn't speak at all. For a week I had no meaningful conversations: there was no emotional weight to anything that I said or that was said to me.

I missed my family and friends. It was strange and discombobulating to be in a city full of people, not one of whom knew or cared about me.

It might be easy to wonder if you exist if you have to live in such solitude for long.

I can see how appalling loneliness must be.

But for me, this was a brief interlude. And while no one in Paris cared about me, I equally didn't care about them, except in a general kind of way. And it was a huge relief, once I settled into my solitude, to have no responsibility except to myself. How often can any of us say that?

It was a luxury, and I took it seriously. I read, walked, looked at people and buildings and art. I walked more. It felt vital to be out, letting whatever I came across come in.

The very difficulty of being alone seemed to strip the wires of my mind of their usual insulation. I was alert and vulnerable. And being exposed emotionally made me open to the hidden currents of the story I was writing.

I'd been worrying at the story for ages. I knew something was missing, and I even knew what but I didn't know how I was going to write it. On the fourth morning in Paris I woke at five o'clock knowing exactly what to do - an idea came into my mind out of nowhere that transforms and completes the story in just the way I'd been looking for.

I'm sure that extended time alone allows me to find things I don't know are there.

There are small pleasures too that I only see when alone: the rhythms of a café as day turns to night, wisps of song coming down the stairwell as the snow falls in the dark outside, the golden sandals my neighbour left outside his front door.

When I was young, I dreamed of being a poet living in a Parisian garret. I'd have friends, of course, and we'd sit in cafés and laugh and argue about life and poems and friendship, but mostly I'd stare moodily out of my tiny window and write.

This last week, I lived a little of that dream. I didn't look moodily out of the window, because I was enjoying writing so much: that's what I didn't know when I was young. I enjoy writing, as well as finding it terrifying and hard work.

And that's the thing. Last week I felt disconnected from the people around me and alone. It wasn't easy. But I'm glad I didn't spend it in a cosy writer's retreat where I could chat to other writers in the evening - though I've been on retreats like these, and I love them, and would gladly go again. But writing, for me, is also about fear, and risk, and exploration so sometimes I have to get a bit uncomfortable and look at things that aren't beautiful, and to feel a little fear.

As a coda, I found this poem, 'Bryant Park at Dusk', by Geoffrey Brock, which  catches the pleasure of solitude perfectly in his description of a lone woman reading in the park as night falls:  

And what I loved was this:
The way, when dusk had darkened her pages,
              As if expecting a kiss,
She closed her eyes and threw her head back,
              Book open on her lap.
Perhaps she was thinking about her story,
              Or the fall air, or a nap.

The whole poem's up on the Poetry Foundation website.

Why we talk about the weather

This morning I awoke to mist. A pale sun shone from behind the swirling grey so I set off straight after breakfast, before the gloom could lift and spoil the effect.

As I set off across the fields I met other walkers, all wrapped up like me in boots and coats and hats, and all but one entirely cheerful.

I knew none of them, but we greeted each other with enthusiasm. 'I think it's going to lift!' 'I saw the sun an hour ago.' 'It's good to be out in it. I'm gardening later so I hope the sun comes out.' Only one said as we slipped towards each other in ankle-deep mud, 'It's disgusting, isn't it?'

I think she was referring to the mud, but if she was, she was bending the English rule: when you meet a stranger, talk about the weather. You don't even need to say you're talking about the weather. 'Gorgeous, isn't it?' can only mean the weather to an English person, no matter how stunning the view.

I've been reading social anthropologist Kate Fox's 'Watching the English': there's a whole chapter on weather talk, and it's revelatory. We talk about the weather because we're so awkward about greetings. We comment to a passer-by on the fog, or the ice, or the sun not because these weather features are fascinating, but because it's a safe way to say, 'I'm friendly, I'm happy to chat a little bit if you are.'

We don't want to chat long - that would be weird. It's fine to exchange just one sentence each and then pass on. But don't we feel better for that short exchange?

I walk most days and pretty much everyone I pass will either comment on the weather, or say 'Morning.' You don't often say 'Hello,' unless you know someone. If you don't want to talk at all (maybe you're deep in thought, or something awful's just happened) it's ok to walk past in silence - but only if you look down and don't meet the other person's eye. And it's not really ok even then.

The weirdest and most unsettling behaviour is when someone walks past you, looks at you, and says nothing. That makes me feel genuinely uncomfortable because that person either doesn't know the rules, or does know them and is consciously breaking them - and in either case, their behaviour is odd, unpredictable and unfriendly.

That's the thing (and you people from towns who laugh at us country people greeting strangers in the middle of nowhere, just listen). Greeting someone means you're letting them know you don't mean them harm. Whether you're a woman walking alone or a group of burly blokes, when you meet on a path in the woods, commenting on the fog helps everyone relax.