Dream the impossible daydream

I'm still holding out for my childhood fantasy about The Writing Life

As a Child of the Eighties, I once saw a movie about a novelist who moves to the country to write in peace in picturesque surroundings. Every morning, he would ascend to his attic studio overlooking a gorgeous lake and begin working on his great American novel, pecking away on his typewriter.

I never watched that movie again—honestly, I forgot about the movie itself. (I recently had to look it up: it’s Funny Farm by Chevy Chase, and I can probably survive the rest of my life without a rewatch). However, the image of the writer at an upstairs desk, gazing out at sparkling water and secluded by woods, has always stuck with me. Whenever I daydream about what my writer life will look like in the future, this is the exact picture I conjure up.

I’m thirty years into a successful career working on other kinds of “content”—first as a journalist, then in marketing and branding, and for the past decade leading content teams for software design. I’m grateful for this career: it helps my family live in comfort, has allowed us to send our daughter to good schools, and it’s given me the resources to pursue my dream of becoming an author. I get a lot of satisfaction out of the work, and I’m proud of what my teams and I have accomplished. All is well.

Enter the daydream

But, I’m also tired. Corporate life, management, and long days are demanding. My brain and body have grown weary. When I begin to daydream about what it looks like to hop off the hamster wheel, one of these days seceding from my full-time job in lieu of a more creative, part-time way of making a living, my mind instantly snaps back to my lifelong daydream: retiring to my country writing cottage.

Maybe I’m also mesmerized by examples of writers I know who are actually living this life, like my crit partner Lynne, who publishes the most spectacular photos of the views from her writing cottage.

My husband Andrew and I talk a lot about where our future home will be, and I often insert these wish-list items into that dreamstorming: it needs to have access to good nature, a room with a view, a quick walk or jaunt to a coffee shop that will let me camp out with my laptop. And, it has to be affordable enough that we can live without massive debt, because we write for love, not for money.

Getting real

I’ll probably never let go of my “funny farm” daydream, but I also need to consume a dose or two of reality. For example:

Would I really thrive as a full-time fiction author? At the moment, because my full-time job consumes most of my time, the few hours I get during the week to work on fiction projects are so precious and glorious to me. While I’m working on my “author business,” I fantasize about how exciting and fun it would be to do this all day, every day. But I often wonder if it all might become tedious if I did it for eight hours a day. Would I find myself just as weary, mentally and physically, as I do with my full-time job now?

We need to acknowledge that we’re city people. Andrew and I would survive exactly forty-five minutes living in the Driftless region of Wisconsin or a tiny town in Maine—at that point, one of us would start asking where the good bagels are or what there is to do nearby. The trick is going to be finding a place that’s “city enough” while delivering all the characteristics of a writerly haven.

I’m doing just fine without a funny farm. This past week, I flew home from a personal weekend trip and then had to attend an offsite for my leadership team in another part of the Bay Area. It was a lot, but I also had some writing goals I wanted to knock out. Here is a partial list of all the places I wrote this week: on the couch, on my back porch, on my phone in line at the airport, in the hotel bed early in the morning, in the hotel bed late at night, hiding in a conference room during a lunch break, on the toilet (seriously), and maybe once at my actual desk.

I remember reading an article a few years ago about a musician (I’m sorry to say I don’t remember who it was) who’d written a novel. Talking about his process, he said something like: “I’m not precious about when and where I write. I write whenever I can.” He essentially wrote his book between sound checks and shows, on the tour bus, and in hotel lobbies.

I hope someday that I will not have to write like this—but I’ve worked hard to not need the quiet attic studio and long stretches of uninterrupted time in order to make progress.

All I hope for, in the near-ish future, is a little less of being pulled in so many different directions, a little more time to prioritize my creative projects. Even if the daydream doesn’t materialize in the exact way I imagined it as a young, aspiring writer, I know I’ll appreciate a more open and accommodating schedule for writing because I fought so hard for so many years to fit it into my life.