#19: The Hottest New Writing Hack – Annual Leave

I’ve just moved to the NSW South Coast. It’s taken a toll on my body, as I knew it would. Luckily, I had the foresight and the privilege to take plenty of annual leave at the end of my contract for my previous role in Meanjin – giving me time to set up and find another job.

I had been applying since November and getting a bit nervous when I didn’t have another contract signed by the time we were packing up the truck, but in a stroke of good fortune I got a phone call with an offer during the twelve-hour drive down. It meant I had a week of annual leave between arriving in my new home and starting at my new job. And I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it.

And I know how this sounds. BREAKING NEWS: Zoomer Last To Discover Normal Work-Life Balance Helps Everything, Including Writing.

And yeah that is pretty much it.

But I was honestly amazed by what I could achieve while I wasn’t worried about surviving. While I’m not being paid, I’m so caught up in the desperate struggle to get paid that writing creatively goes on the back-burner. And I can see immediately the difference after starting work – by the end of the workday my brain is already tired out, and the best I can do is cobble together another 500 words.

During that one week, though, I started on a fiction idea I’ve been mulling over for nearly a year but never getting down. And wrote half of it. I produced more creative work by word count in that week than I have in the previous six months. If you get the chance to take a paid week off work and write, I would highly recommend doing so.

How do you harness this extra time, though?

There were a few moments during that week when I felt the temptation to sink into my bed and scroll on my phone a bit longer. Part of me itched to check my work email. It can be difficult, even when you’ve taken free time, to appreciate it. If you’re burnt out, it’s hard to be anything but tired and do anything but be tired. 

I also had house-setting-up things to do and so I structured my writing around that. I would start the day by making a cup of tea and chucking a podcast on, and sorting the house until the episode was over. Then, I told myself, I would write a page. More often than not it turned into two or three pages before I needed to think about what came next. And when I did, I refused to sit there and watch the still screen and think I’m so tired, I can’t do this. Instead, I would chuck a podcast on, get myself a little treat and sort some stuff around the house. It was doing the double-duty of giving me space away from the screen to think about the story’s trajectory in detail. Come back for a page, or three. Repeat. This method saw me through about 2,000 words per day. Maybe something like that would work for you?

Now that I’m back at work and groaning in misery at the thought of typing another word after each workday, I am really looking forward to weekends. That’s because every Saturday evening at 6pm-8pm AEST (7pm-9pm AEDT) I’m hosting writing sessions on our literary community Discord.

You might know it as The Braddyton, but we’ve renamed it Hilley Literary to reflect our new activities in this new place. I might do a newsletter about that in the future.

These sessions are a great excuse to set aside some time for writing. We’re using the pomodoro method (30 minutes of quiet writing, a break, repeat) so we can chat to each other in breaks but also actually get things done. Feel free to drop in at any time during the sessions, and don’t worry about making it to every one – even just the one little visit is great!

Word Count: 707