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Here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. What do you think about this?
Let me know.
Running Away from Home
I'm taking my own advice to writers and going on retreat this summer. All three of my children will be going to sleep-away camp for four weeks. This is an unprecedented block of non-Mom time. Truly, I haven't experienced anything like this in fifteen years. Here are some of the things I could do during those four weeks: travel to Greece, reorganize all the shelving units in my house, write the lyrics to the next great song, read one-tenth of all the books I've been meaning to read, repaint the upstairs hallway and bedrooms. The list goes on and on.
Instead, I'm going to spend four weeks in a rented studio apartment in an undisclosed location in Maine writing the latest draft of my novel. This is a historical novel that I've been working on for seven years. Seven years! And I'll be starting from page one. A complete rewrite.Non-writing friends ask, "If the kids are gone, why can't you just stay home and write?" In fact, writing friends have asked the same question. The answer lies in the whole idea of "retreat." Here's what I wrote in an article for the SCBWI Bulletin (May 2007): "Going on retreat is about emptiness. And emptiness has everything to do with creativity. When you give yourself the time and space to shut down, you prepare yourself to receive the flood that is creativity in its liquid, unbounded state." Because truly, if I were home, I'd be reorganizing those shelves or repainting the hallway or at least doing the laundry and wiping down the kitchen counter.
But when I'm away, time changes. It's like traveling to the Arctic Circle where summer daylight lasts twenty-two hours a day. There is no dinner time. There is no go-to-bed time. There is no any-specified-activity time. It's all writing time. From the moment I wake up until the moment I choose to go to bed. And my brain writes differently in that time zone.
So wish me luck. It's a short period of time to write a whole novel, but the work has been germinating for seven years. I'm hoping I can do it. And if not, I still have six weeks of summer to reorganize my shelves.
What are you doing this summer? Let me know.
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