You want a social life, with friends...

...but how do you balance that with getting any work done?

Photo by Stavrialena Gontzou on Unsplash

I wrote most of this newsletter yesterday, on Tuesday afternoon. I’m finishing it on Wednesday evening, and now I know something I didn’t know yesterday.

This is how I started it:

The last few weeks have been a bit silly. I don’t need a lot of excuse to get into a celebratory frame of mind, and it was a perfect storm: I span my birthday out for over a week of booze and cake, and then it was the four-day Platinum Jubilee weekend, and I did more or less the same again. It was great, but it’s left me with a physical and psychological hangover. I feel sort of porous and crumbly, like a sugar-cube soaked in rum, and I feel knackered, and worst of all, I feel guilt-stricken – because it hasn’t been a productive spell in terms of writing.

It got me thinking about Kenneth Koch’s famous poem You Want a Social Life, With Friends:

You want a social life, with friends,
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn’t time enough, my friends—
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends—
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day’s end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.

(Buy a collection of Kenneth Koch’s Selected Poems here.)

So of a great social life, a passionate love life and a successful work life, you can apparently have two but not three. Most of the time, I manage about one and a half.

My social life is usually the thing that is going well. I love socialising. Time with friends and family makes life feel meaningful to me. And I think it’s good for us all, but maybe especially for creative people: creativity doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Socialising fills the well, as Julia Cameron would say – it gives us ideas to draw on.

Still, I honestly think I’d have achieved more in life if I hadn’t prioritised fun quite so much. I believe this because I know plenty of writers who go into hermit mode when they’re working. I say yes to invitations during busy spells, and then feel stressed as I watch days tick by without much work progress; maybe I’m kidding myself about this as it’s a convenient theory for me, but I think lots of prolific writers are people who just say no and hide away. I maybe need to develop the skill of being a part-time hermit.

Graham Norton talked about this a bit when he came on the In Writing podcast. Having carved out a spectacular career in TV and radio, he’s become a novelist in recent years. He said he wanted to do it in his twenties, but—

—I’m sort of in awe of people who do write novels when they’re that age, because I look back and I think, well, how could I have written a novel? I was out! I was busy, I was trying to make a living and then spending the meagre living I had in pubs and things. So the idea of spending my days at an old manual typewriter click-clacking away – that was just never going to happen. … I needed to be fifty, because I needed to be home. I needed to be more sedate and less hungover, before I could write a novel.

My own social life has got more sedate too – earlier nights, fewer rounds – but if I’m honest, that’s only because I can’t hack it at 39. I do less, and it takes just as much out of me.

It was lockdown that made it obvious. When I couldn’t spend so much time looking outwards, I had no choice but to turn inwards. I found a better attention span for creative work – not just in the sense of spending more time doing my own writing (as opposed to journalism), but in the sense of going deeper into ideas, maybe more slowly, because I wasn’t so efficiently distracted. It’s thanks to lockdown that I’m doing an MA; if it hadn’t been for the pandemic, I’d probably have told myself I was too busy.

What about you? How do you balance the three elements Kenneth Koch mentions – and the fourth that he doesn’t mention, which is family/children? (That seems like an enormous omission to me.) What interferes with your productivity – and do you find socialising nourishing, or draining?

Here’s the bit I’m writing on Wednesday: I have Covid. Again. Third time. I wasn’t just a crumbly sugar-cube yesterday, I was full of Covid and I didn’t know it. Not enough social distancing. Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise, because I’ve had to cancel all my plans. Maybe, when I’m feeling slightly less disgusting than I am now, I’ll start writing again.

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There’s no audio version of the newsletter today because I’m lying in bed with a fever. I’m sorry. Normal service will hopefully resume next week.

It was so nice to hear, in the comments for last week’s post, that many of you would be interested in a writing hour. I’m hoping to organise one in the next few weeks, so watch this space.

I’ll also be back in touch on Sunday with the In Writing Creative Club for paying subscribers. For £4 a month you can join in with that, and access other fun things such as future writing hours and audio recordings of newsletters and interviews. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast, this newsletter or my other work in the past, becoming a paying subscriber is also a very nice way to support me so that I can keep doing it.

In the meantime, good luck with your writing this week!