A holiday's got me thinking
Plus, join me for a Creative Hour this Sunday.
Paying subscribers can hear me read this aloud here or on your podcast app.
Last time I wrote to you, I was not feeling at all creative. Then I went on holiday.
I find that holidays are pure magic for creativity. It’s a combination of the unrushed time; the absence of stress, to-do lists and guilt; and the stimulation of a new environment. New thoughts start to dawdle in the corners of my mind. It’s been dark, unmoving earth in there for a long time, but suddenly green shoots are emerging.
I haven’t yet written anything down, apart from a couple of notes in my phone. They’re not really ideas, so much as disembodied images and phrases. Still, it’s a good feeling. It’s possibility.
There’s a chapter of the In Writing book dedicated to how writers learn and improve, and in it I write that creative productivity is a privilege. If you’re living with any sense of peril, whether that’s because of money worries or an unpleasant relationship, or whether it’s the mundane circumstances of caring for somebody, or dealing with health problems or work stress – it’s very hard to be imaginative. To be creative, your mind needs to be able to wander along a path that takes it away from you, and if you’re under any kind of threat, it won’t do that – it will guard you fiercely instead (which, by the way, is exhausting). I know there are people like Stephen King who endlessly make work, but I think that’s extremely unusual. Most of us have fertile and infertile seasons.
My life is less perilous than most, so I’m not complaining. Still, sometimes I fantasise about an existence where I’d prance around permanently without a care in the world, far from here, and maybe churn out loads of writing. It’s never going to happen, not just for financial reasons but also because I can’t dump my cares – I care about them. Also, it’s all very well having whimsical glimpses of ideas, which are basically effortless; the graft of turning them into something readable would soon kill off the holiday vibes.
This reminds me of Geoff Dyer’s brilliant Out of Sheer Rage, a sort of meta-book about his attempt to write a book on D. H. Lawrence. He is sure that the reason it’s going badly is that he’s living in the wrong place, so he keeps moving around. At one point, he and his girlfriend borrow an apartment on a Greek island for six weeks.
‘This is paradise,’ I said to Laura, sitting on the terrace, surrounded by sea and sky. ‘I wish we were going to be here for six months.’ Then, after a week, even a fortnight seemed intolerable. Except for looking at the brochure-blue sea and sky – which, after the first couple of days, we scarcely even noticed – there was nothing to do and for that reason it was impossible to get any work done. The best circumstances for writing, I realised within days of arriving on Alonissos, were those in which the world was constantly knocking at your door; in such circumstances the work you were engaged in generated a kind of pressure, a force to keep the world at bay. Whereas here, on Alonissos, there was nothing to keep at bay, there was no incentive to generate any pressure within the work, and so the surrounding emptiness invaded and dissipated, overwhelmed you with inertia. All you could do was look at the sea and sky and after a couple of days you could scarcely be bothered to do that.
(It goes on like this, from failure to failure. It’s very funny.)
Ultimately there’s no substitute to sitting down with your pen or your keyboard and putting the slog in to create something new, and that’s the part I haven’t quite managed yet.
On that note – I’m going to host a Creative Hour this Sunday 11 August at 5pm UK time (timezone converter here). If you’re a paying subscriber, you’ll get the Google Meet link in your inbox early on Sunday.
How about you – are you finding this summer a fertile time for new ideas?
By the way, for anyone on TikTok, I continue to post little videos sharing writing tips I’ve learnt from my interviewees. You can watch them here.
Looking forward to seeing some of you this weekend. Good luck with your writing until then!
I’ve been thinking about this a lot this year as well: I’ve heard that the creative network of our brains will just not switch on when we don’t feel safe, and that’s been helpful for me to know. But also quite depressing as a reason for not being creative
Thanks Hattie, another insightful, thought provoking newsletter. I experience this as well. I come up with better ideas when I'm relaxed.
Evolution seems to have let us down here. You'd think that if ever there was a time for creative solutions it would under pressure, say when facing down an angry saber toothed tiger.
Hope the creative hour is productive for everyone. I can't make it this time which is a a bummer because I usually find it works for me. Interesting that it seems to work for other people too, despite being a form of pressure. Maybe there's good pressure and bad pressure, or enough pressure and too much.