On taking a writing vacation

Last week I finished the thing I’d been working on for a while. I say a while because I can’t remember how long. Sometimes when I’m working on something, especially if it’s long, the calendar becomes tenuous and opaque. The days are marked by numbers of words written. I think about the plot while I’m walking in the park. Sometimes I dream about the characters (when they appear in dreams they are mostly unhelpful and sometimes hostile!). If things are going well I eat the same thing for lunch every day to minimize distractions (an idea I got from the great Margot Livesey). If they’re going badly, I go out and buy junk food.

The thing I finished a draft of is a novella, one of what I hope will be four connected climate change novellas. I finished it knowing that I’d have to revise it rather a lot, for several reasons:

1.I didn’t really know where I was going with it until past the halfway mark, and so it’s rather wandery in certain parts as I tried to write my way through a number of dilemmas and plot tangents.

2.It doesn’t have enough climate change in it.

3.One of the characters is barely more than a tool of the plot, mainly there to provide conversational episodes for the protagonist.

4.It might be too long?

5.Probably other problems that I haven’t thought of yet.

Nevertheless, I was glad to have finished a draft. Thank the god of writing, whoever that is, I thought. It’s done. Even though I knew it wasn’t. And so, the writing vacation.

The vacation was four days long. It was a staycation, since I didn’t go anywhere except to the park and the grocery store and the library. I contemplated my garden (which was wet). I read a lot. Here is a list of books that I read or partially read:

• The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert

• The Griffin Sisters, by Jennifer Weiner

• Strong Poison, by Dorothy Sayers

• The Institute, by Stepen King

• Fairy Tale, by Stephen King

• The Climate Book, by Greta Thunberg

• Writing Women’s Lives, edited by Susan Cahill

• A Writer’s Diary, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Climate Lyricism, by Min Hyoung Song

All the while during those four days I felt the absence of writing, even though I was luxuriating in the freedom of not writing. Several times I said to myself: I’m not writing. As if I had to remind myself that I was a person who wasn’t writing, that I was a writer who wasn’t writing but that this state would be temporary. I was still who I was, right?

I once had a dream in which I was swimming in deep water. I didn’t need to breathe, or I could breathe under water, it wasn’t clear which. As I went deeper, the water was darker, but I could see things on the bottom that were bright colored or even glowing. I knew that I had to gather them up, to save them and bring them back. This was a dream about writing (although maybe there’s some deeply Freudian meaning that eluded me, and if there is, don’t tell me).

I was thinking about this because during my writing vacation I had a brief conversation about why anyone writes or does art of any kind. My niece and her family were visiting and I was sitting in my sister’s living room talking with my sister, my niece, and her husband. He said that it was because we want to leave something behind, which is reasonable. Ars longa, vita brevis (theoretically anyway).

I didn’t disagree with him but I thought about it then and afterward, and I think for me it’s different. When I write I want to save what might be lost, and those savings might be scraps of conversation or the memory of some drab little street with a glowing neon pizza sign or what exactly happened at the high school prom or the essence of a person.

Actually I did write something during my writing vacation, and it was in service of that, the saving of something about to be lost, or more accurately, someone. Someone I knew died last week, and I wrote about it, a little scrap of memory picked from the long years I’d known her. The consciousness of her death was weighing on me (and probably my sister, too) during that conversation about leaving something behind. We had spoken about it obliquely. We talked about what song we’d like to have played at our own funerals, bravely poking at our own mortality.

I don’t want her to be lost, although she’s lost already, and I don’t want any of the rest of it, all the scraps and bits and random thoughts and sights and smells that I’ve been privileged to gather up – I’m hoping to save it all and weave it together into something pleasing or terrifying. Something readable anyway. It’s impossible and maybe it won’t make any difference, but that’s what we do, what writers do, or that’s how it seems to me.