In my experience, writing and vacationing don’t mix.
The point of a vacation is to leave your work behind. That’s hard to do if you carry your office around in your head. It’s not like you can trade in your work head for the vacation head in your closet, the one hanging next to the Hawaiian shirts.
(Not that I have any Hawaiian shirts. But you get the point.)
Apparently, my head belongs to a powerful union. It has a deal whereby it gets to travel with me, whether or not I want it along for the ride.
Of course, this kind of problem isn’t limited to the writing life. There are plenty of people, in every line of work, who have a hard time leaving the job behind. It’s one thing to trade familiar surroundings for exotic ones; it’s something else altogether to lose yourself in a new experience. And isn’t the whole point of travel to set aside the workaday self and try something different for a change?
But the writer’s problem is especially acute. Everything he sees and does, every new person he meets, each new sensation, pleasant or not — all of it is grist for the imaginative mill.
Some writers use travel to great advantage. Ernest Hemingway comes to mind. Or Paul Theroux. But we’re talking here about relaxing, not treating a trip as a future tax deduction.
This is not to say that being away always feels like work. But when I travel, the other Matthew, the invisible one who hovers over my shoulder, endlessly taking notes and filing them away, never seems to take a break.
And that’s the best-case scenario!
The worst case is when a long-planned vacation happens to fall in the middle of an intense burst of writing: an intense firefight, say, with a difficult revision. Then travel becomes a matter of dragging along an entire imaginative universe — or being dragged along by it, like a gnat trapped in a drop of water.
Nobody likes vacationing with a gnat. I can tell you that from experience.
As I said at the outset, writing and vacationing don’t mix. Which is one of the many reasons writing and marriage often don’t mix, either.
My advice to young writers who feel the urge to marry is this: find a partner with the patience of a saint.
Shana, my own in-house saint, discovered fairly early on that she’d married a vacation-challenged man. Unfortunately, her work life is the opposite of mine. She operates in the center of a vast web of colleagues and projects. Vacations have to be planned months in advance, with the rigor of a military campaign. She’s one of those tireless government bureaucrats you never hear about, the kind who show up early and come home late every day, and whose so-called lunch break, more often than not, is a handful of carrots wolfed down during a teleconference in a drab meeting room.
Needless to say, when she’s on vacation, she’s on vacation.
Over the years, we’ve learned a hard lesson: sometimes the best vacations are taken alone. Or with a plus-one, in the form of our daughter.
As a matter of fact, the Ladies are vacationing right now down in Belize, enjoying a tropical climate (way too hot for a certain literary walrus), full of exotic flora and fauna (read, “very buggy”), with plenty of adventure activities (p.s., snorkeling’s for the beardless).
The house is empty. A bachelor’s paradise, really. And what am I doing with all of this peace and quiet?
Cleaning! Patching walls! Going through old receipts! Filing actual papers, as opposed to imaginary ones! Organizing! Simplifying!
Yes, it’s all very exciting. I’ll understand if you’re green with envy.
There’s a lot to be said for a busman’s holiday. Same old house. Same old neighborhood. Not much to distract me from the usual routine.
With conditions like that, a guy could seriously write a column.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 29 March 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
