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| Coming into Manly Beach, Sydney, on the ferry. |
An overseas trip is great, especially if you’re catching up with grandchildren you’ve never seen face to face before.
It’s not so good when it completely takes your attention
away from a work in progress, and you come home feeling you have to start from
scratch.
Which is what’s happened in my case. All my creative
energy has gone into getting to know little people I’ve never met before, or
ones who are now several years older than the last time I saw them. Or spending
spurts of time in unfamiliar cities, finding my way around them. Or sitting
long hours in airports surrounded by thousands of people I don’t know and will
never know.
It’s a week since my wife and I returned home, and the creative
brain is still saying I’m too tired, I’m jet-lagged, I can’t be bothered…let
me sleep!
No doubt many travellers recover from long flights and
unfamiliar places in a day or three. I’m not quite as young as I was – who is? –
and for me and my wife, the recovery process has seemed much longer than we’d
have expected.
So what to do? Submit to procrastination or work out a
way to make some progress again? The lazy brain would be happy to go with the
former. The soul that’s made of sterner stuff says something along the lines of
‘seize the day’ and makes me uncomfortable if I dare to lay my head down for a
moment or two.
So…I can say to myself:
'One option is to read through the draft as it stands. Make
notes. Say what you like, what you hate. Remind yourself that before you left
for overseas you were already thinking that what you have in hand isn’t
the way to go and that a rewrite of these early chapters is necessary.
Don’t berate yourself. Life always gets in the way of
creativity.
Do say, as you sit down and scroll yet again through Twitter-cum-X that you didn’t miss the news while you were away, so why do you need to know so much about it now?
There’ll always be news. There won’t always be time to
create.'
5 comments:
Oh, I didn't know you'd moved to Australia, Mike! My mum used to live in Sydney years ago. I'm sure I visited Manly Beach then.
I'd say, give yourself time. The creative juices will start flowing again when you have the energy. Reading the manuscript and making notes about it sounds like a good place to start, too.
It's Chris Lovie-Tyler, by the way. For some reason the Blogger commenting system identified me as "Unknown". 😆
Hi Chris, I haven't moved to Australia, though Melbourne is my birthplace. I've just spent two days there at the end of a trip to the US to see my son and his family.
Oh, right. The combination of the title and the image caption made me think Sidney was your new home. Obviously not. 😊
A fair enough assumption, Chris!
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