A couple of weeks ago, in an effort to properly finish an article I'd been working on for a couple of months, I went 'off the grid' - I headed to the middle of nowhere in order to do nothing but write. Here's how it went down...
Notes From The Middle Of Nowhere
Whilst I am a
freelance writer – a treacherous, minefield of a vocation in this day and age –
I’m a lucky one in that I hold an editorial position as well. As Assistant
Editor at Rhythms magazine, a small
niche publication specialising in ‘roots’ music, I’m able to lay claim to a
small monthly salary, something which combined with my freelance income, is
enough to keep me in the (albeit frugal) manner to which I have become
accustomed.
With that
financial ‘security’ however, comes a myriad distractions which serve to take
my focus off freelance writing (particularly long form pieces which require
more thought, research and time to execute than most other pieces of writing).
For the most part, this isn’t a problem – I’ve worked as a freelancer, from
home with no one ‘telling me what to do’, for a number of years now, and so organisation
and time management are two of my strong points. Sometimes however, in the grip
of the monthly Rhythms deadline, the
planning for the next few issues, the fielding of countless emails and phone
calls, long form freelance journalism can fall by the wayside.
Not that I’m
missing deadlines. In this instance, I’m writing a long piece ‘on spec’, an
increasingly common occurrence in a time when magazine budgets are tighter than
a politician’s hip pocket, when editorial staff are happy to read something,
but not necessarily commission it, lest they ‘waste’ their editorial budget on
something they’ve since decided they don’t want to run. As such, there is no
deadline. Also as such, this particular piece of writing keeps getting pushed
to the bottom of the To Do pile, as editorial work and smaller, deadline
dependent pieces of writing demand my attention.
I’ve spent a lot
of time on this piece – at least ten hours worth of interviewing, a few hours spent transcribing same, hours spent planning and researching, and a lot
of hours spent on penning the first draft, something I did in between the
aforementioned distractions. It’s a piece I’m very passionate about (despite
the fact I’ve had to let it lie, lest I starve to death), and so it came to a
point recently where I realised I had to do something drastic, in order for it
to come to fruition properly.
This decision?
Sequester myself, head ‘off the grid’, get out, get away, go somewhere where
distraction wasn’t an option. And so I did, I headed out to the Middle Of
Nowhere, in order to do nothing but write, and in hindsight, it was one of the
best things I could have done.
***
Longtime friends of
my wife’s family own a small property in the hills behind Pottsville, on the
upper NSW coast, about half an hour north from where we live. It’s a modest
house on a few acres, in a gully surrounded by towering hills some fifteen
kilometres inland from the coast. It has no internet, the phone reception is
basically nonexistent, the nearest neighbour is at least a ten minute drive
away, and the only other inhabitants on this mini-farm are a clutch of chickens
and some inquisitive cows. The perfect place to decamp in order to do nothing
but practice one’s craft.
Early on a
Saturday morning recently then, during that glorious week and a half between Rhythms deadline and the next editorial
meeting, I packed the car with a few clothes, a bag of food, a six-pack of beer
and half a bottle of gin, and headed northward. The drive is only a short one,
through a couple of small villages, along windy roads, crossing once over the
Pacific Highway, once underneath it, onto a one-lane road, over causeways to
the front gate (unlocked by a neighbour), up the driveway, which, should it
have rained torrentially whilst I was up there, would have become impassable,
to the house itself, a fortress of solitude as I hoped it would be.
The house had been
unlocked too, and so I unpacked my meager possessions, put my beer, sausages
and bacon in the fridge, set up a writing desk at the kitchen table, boiled the
kettle and stood on the back deck with a cuppa and a smoke, deafened by the
absolute silence of my surrounds. A quick look at my phone, no reception at
all. My laptop open on the table, email program languid and unusable. The
television new and not yet tuned, and in fact, no antenna plug. Not a single
distraction from the task at hand.
I finished my
smoke, butted it out in an old tea light candle sitting on the outside table,
and went inside, with no other option that to begin what I’d come here for, to
properly put together this piece of writing that I’d so laboured on, these
weeks past. It was time to work.
I was up at ‘the
farm’ for 27 hours. During that time, I didn’t utter a single word. I did
however, write three and a half thousand of them. I transcribed, I planned, I
went back to my original draft (which my Rhythms
editor had gone through with a fine tooth comb, and offered a plethora of
constructive criticism on) and I began another. From scratch.
Every so often,
I’d re-boil the kettle and make another cup of coffee. I’d regularly down tools
and stand on the deck, smoking and thinking. As dusk began to descend, I walked
down to the creek and gathered kindling, came back and lit the fire in the
kitchen, turned on a light or two. And I kept writing. I’d make notes in my
notebook, pages and pages which to the untrained eye most likely looked like
chicken scratch with no discernable direction, but which helped me shape what
was becoming an article, as opposed to merely words on a computer screen.
At around
seven-thirty, I began to think of dinner and the football game which I knew
friends back home would be watching. It was then that I discovered I had no
television access, and so in lieu of that, I kept writing, stopping
periodically to fork in a mouthful of sausage and mashed potato, steamed carrot
and broccoli. The fire died three or four times as I neglected it, occasionally
realising when my fingers got cold, re-stocking it with pages from the only
newspaper I had, it’s resultant rebirth warming me for long enough to continue
writing.
I’d had my first
beer at around four that afternoon, but had since switched to gin, each glass
of which not lasting more than twenty minutes or so, breaks to refill, mind
still on the task, not concentrating on what I was doing away from the kitchen
table, cutting up three different limes when one would have done the night’s
work on its own.
I eventually
stopped at around one in the morning, a sore back preventing me from properly
concentrating any longer, but light of heart and mind as I re-read what I’d
written over the past 12 hours, reinforcing to me that this was a fine idea,
that I was getting things done, and not just
getting things done, but getting them done in a way that made me proud. I
suppose I could have brought a bag of smoke up here with me, toked up and
gotten loose, but I was higher on what I was doing than any chemical could have
made me. I felt good, invincible. But also tired, and so I wrapped myself up in
a sleeping bag on the lounge room couch and soon fell asleep, words reeling
around in my head, computer keys finally as silent as the world outside.
***
I awoke early the
next morning, the cold, early winter light filtering through the many lounge
room windows, listened to the cluck and scratch of the chickens just outside. A
rooster crowed a few times, but other than that, total silence. I got up and
made coffee, stood once again on the deck outside and smoked and contemplated
how I’d go about beginning again.
First, a re-read,
from the start, back to the notes, back to the screen, and to my delight it
began again as if I’d not stopped for six or seven hours, the story unfolding
before me, from inside me, with nothing to block it, hinder it, render it
second fiddle.
The end was the
hardest part to write, as it usually is for me, the summing up of all that’s
come before it, the part which puts it all into perspective, that makes it all
make sense, even more so than it (hopefully) already has. I’d stopped at around
ten to make breakfast and I’d broken for coffee and smokes, but at around one
in the afternoon, I had what I considered a draft, an article, the fruits of my
labours over the past day and a bit, and I was happy. Yet another re-read – it
was at the point now where I could have recited the entire three and a half
thousand words – and yet another re-read, not so much taking in the words as
taking in the gist of the sections, making sure they ran together in a way
which not only built a story, but supported my original hypothesis, the
evidence to prove same, that it all came together as it should.
At around
two-thirty, I decided I couldn’t do much more to it, and so packed up my
possessions, washed the dishes I’d used, doused the fire, stood outside in the
total silence – not even any bird call today, grey sky, threatening to rain –
and thought about what I’d just done, what I’d achieved, how maybe this is how
Hemmingway or Kerouac or Thompson would have felt when completing a piece of
writing they’d purposely gone off the grid to complete. I felt like a real
writer. It felt right.
I drove slowly
home, back down the treacherous driveway, out the gate, closing it behind me
and making my way along the single-lane road, over causeways, under the Pacific
Highway and through the small villages, back home to my wife, sitting at the
kitchen table doing some solitary work of her own. I felt alive and incredibly
empowered within my craft, I knew that what I’d done had been a success – I’d
said to a couple of people before doing this, that I’d either come home
excited, or angry and frustrated, and thankfully it was the former.
I was looking
forward to getting back into the editorial process too, it’s like the whole
exercise, which took only a little over a day, had energised my entire
professional outlook. But to decamp to the Middle Of Nowhere just to write like
that, was one of the best things I’ve ever done, and there is no doubt, that
I’ll do it again.
Samuel J. Fell
