Post by Nick Johnstone

A popular myth about writing is that everyone who writes, writes everyday. It stems from the mythology of a blinding passion being the fuel of writing. And who powered by a blinding passion can go a day without writing?

The reality is very different. Writing, as I see it, is episodic, seasonal. I rarely write everyday. And in fact, recently, I took an epic nine month break from writing altogether, to refresh my palette, charge up my fingertips and gather some new rolling down the hillside of life experience.

People skeptically said to me of this sabbatical, Oh but Nick you can only afford to do this because you’ve written fifteen books. But the reality is this: I’ve taken breaks from writing before, in fact quite regularly.

Studying the fever graph of my writing career, I see episodic seasons of high temperature productivity (for example, in one season, the writing of three 70,000 word books in 15 months); in-between quiet seasons of bitty, fleeting, quick-turnaround activity (journalism, essays, contributions to anthologies, album liner notes, blogging) and hushed periods of no-writing where there was quite happily nothing that I wanted to say through writing.

On the MA Writing Business course, we had a guest speaker recently – a former graduate of our BA Creative Writing programme – and she said that at one point on her road to success, she didn’t write a single word for eighteen months.

The best part of this revelation is that her writing career took off as soon as that sabbatical ended and she’s now doing very well for herself. That eighteen month silence, though painful at the time, with hindsight now, turns out to be the best career move she could have made because she stayed silent when it was the right move to stay silent. When she started feeling her writing again, she followed that call and doors opened for her all over London.

If you look at writing careers generally, of course you’ll find plenty of examples of writers who can go about the work with a factory-esque 9 to 5 vigour, books firing off into bookshops with precise regularity. That’s just one way of writing. Just as my episodic, seasonal variety is one more. The point here? Don’t worry if you don’t write anything for a few days, weeks or even months. You haven’t lost the passion. You’re no less of a writer. You’re just busy being you. Trust that the silence is more fertile than a screen full of empty words. That writing is a journey. And that when you have something to say again, the words will of course come running by the thousand.

Nick Johnstone,  13 October 2016