Holidays don’t always give you writing time

Holidays don’t automatically deliver up everyone’s most productive writing time.

Unless you’re a hermit who works off solar power in a cave somewhere, you are likely to be hit by a barrage of conflicting pressures.

If you have children, they’re going to be on holiday too. And if you already have them, you’ll have a pretty good idea how much wonderful, uninterrupted time you’ll have. And how considerate the little mites will be to your need for some you-time.

If you have a partner, well … ditto. Same goes for parents and extended families – if this time of year means getting them all together.

But holidays can still be good for honing your skills, particularly if your plans involve travel.

Carry a notebook with you everywhere, even if it becomes sticky with salt and gritty with grains of sand.  And don’t just write indulgently about your feelings, when the urge comes upon you. Rather give yourself small exercises.

Set yourself the task of describing the unfamiliar landscape, using all your senses. This will force you to view your setting with writerly eyes. Practise finding the words to create the experience of the place for someone who isn’t there.

And don’t describe it in a vacuum. When you write, your setting will always be filtered through the state of mind of your characters. A jungle will look very different to two people if one is exciting and the other fearful.

Try describing it from the perspective of your present state of mind. Then just for the hell of it, practise describing it as another person might see it, 

Besides giving yourself a five-finger exercise, I believe it wil enhance your own experience. If we don’t force ourselves to look at things intensely, we have a tendency to sweep over them without really seeing, smelling and feeling them.

The more you practise viewing things in this way, the easier it becomes. But mark your notebooks and keep them. You never know when you’ll need your holiday destination as a setting. If you haven’t considered it intensely and scribbled down notes, you won’t remember it precisely enough to describe it well.

You can also use your holiday to consider people as intensely as you do the landscape. Watch them, make notes of gestures, mannerisms, the way people behave.

These notes will later form the basis for any number of character descriptions. Lastly, eavesdrop shamelessly. You’ll hear scraps of dialogue that provide wonderful texture and give you a good sense of real speech patterns.

And okay … when you’ve done all that, you can use your notebook to write indulgently about your feelings.