This is episode three of the In Haste podcast with today’s guest, Sophie Mackintosh. Each episode of In Haste is accompanied by an original essay below by Alice Vincent or Charlotte Runcie. New episodes are released weekly, but paid subscribers can access more episodes instantly. Upgrade your subscription by clicking the button.
On writing away
by Alice Vincent
There are certain things, I’m not too proud to admit, over which I am a giant hypocrite. Working on holiday is one of them. For most of my career I’ve been a boundaried nine-to-fiver: “annual leave” was a thing that was booked in weeks in advanced and counted down to. Writing an out-of-office email delivered its own frisson. For a long time I went on holiday with a freelancer who loved his work and hadn’t really been on holiday for a decade. I struggled to understand why he felt it was acceptable to write or do emails while we were away, even while I packed a laptop into my suitcase in case I wanted to write.
Time has elapsed and things have changed: now I’m the person who makes up her own working hours and he keeps to a salaried job (nine-to-fives don’t exist, not in our industries anyway). He’s come to relish the break but still tucks his work phone into the case. I still tut at this, all the while taking us on thinly veiled research trips or escaping onto a roof terrace at first light to tap away. His work is work, mine is writing. Somehow one is more permissible than the other.
I know it’s not fair. It probably makes me sound like a terrible person. But I have always enjoyed writing away. I am a big holiday person: I love an out of office, I take emails off my phone, I’ll make sure I meet every deadline before I pack my bag. To me, these things are work; writing is something that happens when my brain is stimulated in different ways. A change of scene can be exactly that.
I raise the matter this week because when we found out
was coming on I wanted, near-immediately, to ask her about what I have called her Chic Little Holidays. I follow Sophie on Instagram and I really enjoy her narration on her own life through there. At times it seems like she writes next to windows in Parisian rooms or by an Italian lake, a glinting Aperol Spritz nearby. I wanted to know how a change of scene affected her work. “I find a very perverse pleasure in not taking my laptop on holiday,” she replied. “I can’t believe I’m going away for five days and I’m not going to be available at all. And then I’m like, that’s actually a normal thing.” Still, she admitted, a break away can be really helpful for generating ideas.It’s interesting that, despite having the laptop to hand, I’m not tempted to use it for anything other than writing when I am away. Emails hold no allure, watching Netflix or scrolling through the news couldn’t be less appealing. But I still like having this space to get the words down in a way that just wouldn’t happen with a notebook. I have written newsletters while away. I have things that ended up in my books while on holiday.
I finished the manuscript for Rootbound: Rewilding a Life in a pink fisherman’s hut on Dungeness; for three days I existed offline, walking to Prospect Cottage and back to catch a break. This created its own fascination with getting away with the explicit purpose of finishing, proofing, starting or escaping a book: I have begun proposals in strange, lonely hotel rooms in Cornwall. I have smuggled fat jiffy bags filled with printed typeset pages into Norfolk AirBnbs and boutique hotels in Provence. There was the time I went from the launch party of my debut to the airport, for two weeks alone in Japan, within 24 hours, or the three nights I spent off-grid on the coast of Northumberland in January to sit with the strange vacuum that follows the release of a book.
There’s privilege and symbolism and, well, effort behind all of these, of course. It is a very conscious thing to go away with the explicit intention to write. It sounds idyllic, but I can confirm that it is lonely and can feel as preposterous as freeing. I haven’t managed a writing trip since the release of Why Women Grow: I had a baby three weeks after and while I have been away from him everything is so meticulously jam-packed now. There’s a strange luxury in knowing that I used to go and feel bored with my own work.
But I suspect the writing away trips will return. I’ve already told
we’ll go on one, for instance (And I’m holding her to that - Charlotte). When so much of work happens in the short distance between your head and your keyboard, sometimes it’s helpful to make a journey.
Should you write on holiday? with Sophie Mackintosh