The end of vacation brings with it the looming sense of a cliff ahead, or the approach of some kind of squall of normalcy that will obliterate the relaxation of a break. As with any good vacation, I have been able to take a step back from my everyday and consider changes big and small, from rank escapism to changes of habit that could start tomorrow. I found that in the quiet moments, I returned to one of my not-infrequent items of consideration: writing a novel. With the end of this trip bearing down on me – less than 24 hours remain – I began the exercise of wondering if that was something I could fit into my everyday life, or whether it would require a radical change of habits, focus, and perhaps even location.
On a similar literary note, Nora Roberts came up in conversation, my sister telling me that’s the sort of thing she would write were she to pursue a writerly career (she was also top-of-mind because she lives in a small town in rural Maryland). I think she had told me this a few years ago in a coffee shop in New York City, when I confessed that my ultimate dream of escaping the rat race would be to write airport fiction under an assumed name. This second occurrence made me look into Nora Roberts, whose work is of course omnipresent in bookstores everywhere and perhaps more familiar from my mother’s bedside table. I was astonished to discover just how prolific Roberts is – writing roughly 6 novels a year since the 1980s. Moreover she has an unromantic (ha!) view of the work, forcing herself to write six to eight hours a day, five or six days a week. She loves the process, she says, but finds it difficult to write, and so requires discipline to maintain her pace. I learned all this in an interview with her I found on YouTube (surprisingly few interviews exist for someone earning $60M a year, in my mind), where the interviewer also walked through the office where she presumably does most of her writing. A plain desk with a nice view to the woods outside the home she has lived in for 50 years….and to her left, a shelf staining under the weight of her many awards.
Roberts’ view made me consider isolation and its value, and my own preferences. My family all spoke last night about what sort of place we find idyllic, where we could live for all time as opposed to visit for a few weeks before we were driven insane. Our Airbnb for this week is a rambling old farmhouse on a large lot, abutting a beautiful stretch of river and marshland. We are sufficiently far upriver that the water is shallow and the traffic we are used to seeing further downriver simply does not exist. Nature is more present here than any place I have been in years – insects, birds, lizards, fish – the setting is beautiful, the quiet extremely soothing. Nevertheless, several of my family stated with total confidence they could not live in a place like this as it feels too isolated. C countered this place was idyllic and that driving to town or social settings was something many people are comfortable with. When it came to be my turn to weigh in, I was surprised to find I didn’t have strong feelings. The central question, of course, is what you do with yourself. I find myself deeply uncertain about what that is for me, stuck between the vacation escapism – rightly or wrongly I feel that an isolated, beautiful place like this would be perfect for writing – and the pragmatism of what I know now and value – access to amenities, walkability, mass transit, cultural sites. I perhaps feel more pressure to get this “right” given the increasingly concrete timeline for selling the current house, paired with the increasingly concrete reality that I have no idea where to go next.
I reflect on a piece I read not long ago that pointed out the extraordinarily wealthy have never worked so hard – that is, in the present day the tycoons (private equity mavens, hedge funds titans, tech gurus) are characterized by their extraordinary hours, which was not the case in past decades. If this relationship were to remain universal and my best way to improve my lifestyle would be, all else equal, to work more hours (something I am not convinced by, but let’s finish the thought process), what would I buy with my millions such that I could properly enjoy the few off hours I had? Travel is wonderful, but I have no desire to be hopping on private jets and join parties in the far-flung corners of the world. Indeed, people (beyond close family and friends) would have little role in filling those precious hours. The image is misty, but I suspect that a singular place would be the goal – somewhere comfortable, relaxing, fairly isolated (at least comparatively), and filled with things that bring us happiness, i.e. good food, good wine, good books, great outdoors, a fireplace, and a decent internet connection. A boat seems like a nice toy to have, but decidedly a boat and not a ship – if I want something with a crew I’m happy to go aboard something commercial. Honestly I would prefer a library, exceedingly comfortable couches, a warm fire with a loyal hound, and a dinner sufficiently compelling to call me away from whatever I am reading. Part of me recoils at this, wondering if it is rather too much like what might be found inside a Thomas Kinkade painting. And then of course the whole things becomes one-dimensional when I reflect the underlying lifestyle it is based on – one I have consistently rejected for more than a decade now. This adds the “constraint” of reality (that dreaded antidote to escapism) to the question of how to obtain the unobtainable, even as I struggle to define the unobtainable itself! What does it look like to proceed in smaller steps? Buy land and build a small house, with an eye towards expanding over the years? Proceed along a more normal course, but save every penny possible along the way in order to be able to splash out in the future? Constantly look for that perfect place and be ready to pounce when you find it, even if it leaves you in straightened circumstances? Hard to know. I suppose that for now I am happy to keep that escapist instinct alive and reflect on the fact that many people don’t become successful at their dream job until they are well into their regular career, and I have plenty of the latter to keep me busy!
Returning to the idea of dreams, locations, and living, as it applies to writers I formed a hunch that isolation is good, and decided to do some research on top-selling authors and more specifically where and how they write. Nora Roberts has been working 40 hours a week for 40+ years in her rural Maryland town. Patrick Rothfuss made the very compelling point years ago that if you want to be a writer, the best thing you can do for yourself is live somewhere extremely cheap – which in my mind means rural and isolated. Rothfuss himself lives somewhere in the back of beyond, Wisconsin, and his writing room is a pre-internet word processor on a spare desk in an empty room. Stephen King, the lord of airport fiction, writes every day (a quota of words rather than time, in his case) to maintain his productivity. Michael Connelly, too, writes every day in a room with blackout curtains so he has no sense of time or distractions from the task at hand. James Patterson appears to get up before dawn to outline and write, taking a break only to amble around the golf course. John Grisham goes so far as to actually publish his tips for writing, noting that his own habit is to wake up pre-dawn and be sitting at the same desk, at the same time, and not stopping until he has completed one page. Danielle Steel tries to be at her desk by 8am and will work for at least eight hours, but frequently more than 20 hours a day. Indeed, I am hard-pressed to find any living bestselling author who doesn’t have a serious routine for writing but then again that shouldn’t be surprising – it’s a job as much as a calling! Not surprising that so many of them speak dismissively of “the muse” and that the real art of writing is being at the coalface every day rather than waiting to find diamonds between the couch cushions. The fact that they are so hard at it, and so singularly focused, perhaps obviates the need for isolation. Nevertheless, I did note that comparatively few seemed to live or work in cities or densely populated areas, and many made specific mention of being able to get outdoors as part of their process.
It might also be worth noting that all of these people, barring perhaps Rothfuss, are of a certain age (and Rothfuss is far and away the least prolific on the list). They established themselves and their writing habits in pre-internet periods. “In an age of few distractions,” Gore Vidal once wrote in describing the Founding Fathers of the United States – writers in their 60s and 70s might not have had few distractions, but they undoubtedly had fewer than a first-time novelist does today. The internet and its overwhelming amount of non-information, combined with the inability to escape its reach (barring a willingness to embrace a truly hermitical existence) make distractions more potent than they have ever been. The need to put in the work undoubtedly remains the same, but the ability to do so and how one gets there will of course evolve with the times.
For now, I suppose it all comes back to “a room of one’s own.” Those of us already fortunate enough to have that are held back by precisely nothing. Conflating escapist dreams of a quiet, comfortable life in a beautiful location with a fancied career I suppose suited to the place is a logical error, even if it paints a wonderful mental picture to dwell on during vacation. The first step to successful writing is to write, and keep writing. The first successful step to achieving the rest of the dream is to define it in terms of what is and isn’t wanted, which can be done through trial and error if nothing else.
As such, as a lover of genre fiction, I will seek out a bunch of Gold Dagger award-winners to read them. And for real estate, I have a bathroom to re-do, but until that is done I can start winnowing down the zip codes in which I want to search.
Off to kayaking and the last 24 hours of vacation!
smq.world 