I took six months out of work to focus on my writing career and I thought it would change my writing forever. Mostly though, it changed me. I kept a diary throughout the six month experiment and I’ve compiled the highlights (and lowlights) so you can see how it all panned out.

30th March (Day 1)

Today I wrote a list. A list of things I was 100% certain I wanted. That’s 100% certain. No room for doubt or outside influence or expectation. (Try it, it’s surprisingly hard.)

My list had two entries:

I want to live with my dog.
I want to write.

April

I had absolutely no routine this month. I went to bed at 1 or 2 in the morning, slept late into the day, wrote sporadically and, overall, had a prevalent sense of failure and anxiety. I started this experiment desperate to escape from the life that was making me miserable but it seemed the misery was still in me and the need for escape was still very much running through my veins.

May

Something had to change to make my take this more seriously. I started actively nurturing my creative side: joined two new writing groups, spent a whole day at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre watching the history plays and I began to explore poetry – a previously highly neglected form of creativity for me.

My writing became more routine. I began to average 1,000 words a day.

I sated my need for escape by planning an adventure: my biggest yet. My first flight on my own, followed by a two-day hike through the Black Forest. I will write a post about that adventure soon. It was utterly terrifying, intensely hard and absolutely amazing.

In the airport before my flight I wrote:

“I feel full like I’m truly satisfied. I feel pregnant with possibilities. I feel open; acutely observant and expansive. For the first time in years: years and years, I feel wild.”

June

Something about risk-taking had got me hooked and I spent a lot of time riding my motorbike this month – a relatively new and frightening activity!

One afternoon I rode to my sister’s house and the journey shook me up so much, I almost chickened out and asked for a lift home. I left her house when it was dark. I put on my gear and started my bike and set off into the night. As I pulled out of her drive, there was a rumble of thunder. Within minutes I was riding through the most dramatic lightning storm I’ve ever seen.

Jagged forks of light struck the ground and strange spirals and circles of lightning popped into the darkness above me. But, somehow, riding through the lightning, I reached the eye of the storm of my own fear. The situation had become so intense I no longer felt afraid. I rode through the darkness and light, hearing the crackle of raindrops on my visor as if they couldn’t touch me, feeling completely calm. I was filled, instead, with wonder at how amazing and beautiful it all was.

I felt a powerful desire to capture it: all of the madness and beauty and my writing began to reflect this new approach to fear and beauty and freedom.

This month changed me: I never wanted to go back to life how it had been before this. Not now I knew how it felt to live life in pursuit of what I truly loved.

July

This was perhaps the hardest month I have ever experienced. It came right out of nowhere and blind-sided me. I felt intense anxiety and extreme vulnerability. I kept writing, just the same, but I had never felt more inadequate. I was 30 years old, single, unemployed, living with my parents, and had no linear plan for any aspect of my life. What’s more, my adventuring had rinsed through my savings faster than I had anticipated and I was now officially in my overdraft.

One afternoon I found myself riding to the small white chapel on a hill – the place a lot of my family are buried. It was a blistering day, well above thirty degrees, and the crickets sang loud in the long sand-coloured grass as I climbed the hill.

I sat on a bench in the tree-shade and looked at the grave of my grandfather: he spent his whole life running a farm and his family of 10 and preaching at the local church – giving his time to what mattered to him. And, a few stones down, my great aunt, who ran a health-food shop before that was even a thing, and got into politics so she could give the voiceless a voice, and poured all her energy into charity and helping anyone she saw being overlooked. I had never felt so low and so worthless.

But, when I picked myself up off that bench, walked back down the hill and rode the winding back-lanes home, I had somehow come to know deep in the core of myself that, no matter how low I felt, I could and would finish this novel.

That sense of capability in my writing, that determination, is something I had never felt certain of before.

And that sense of determination meant that, when my sister wanted to come home from Germany at the end of the month, I drove out to get her. A road-trip that marked the end of my engine stalling, and the start of moving forward no matter what.

August

One morning I rolled out of bed, groggy as hell, threw on some not-that-clean-actually clothes and wandered out to walk my dog in the park. I walked around like a shell of a woman and thought about how sorry for myself I felt. And then it happened: a strange sense of bubbling emotion deep down in the pit of my stomach, building up and up until it covered my chest and rose to my throat making me want to laugh.

Somehow, I had reached an emotional rock bottom and I felt an undeniable, effervescent joy at everything life had to offer. Now I knew I was on the right path. I knew it with the same physicality and certainty that I knew my feet were on the ground.

But, my time on this writing experiment was nearly up. Next month was judgement time: would the agents tell me I had spent my time well, or would they laugh me out of the room and tell me to go back to lawyering?

Finding the Wild Path

I am upstairs in the café in Debenhams during my lunchbreak, desperately working on the novel I hope will save me from the life that is making me miserable.

I don’t always get to take my break, I don’t always have a free evening, I often work weekends but, when I do get fifteen or twenty minutes spare, I work on my novel like I never have before.

Like my life depends on it.

I sit in the hard armchair in my counsellor’s office looking for someone to tell me how to live. I know that’s not what counsellors are for but I’m desperate. We have talked about writing, we have talked about my law career, and then he says,

“What do you think would happen if you were to write full time?”

He may as well have asked the armchair for all the answer I’ll give him. I stare at him blankly. If writing full time was an option, doesn’t he think I would have taken it?

So, he says into the silence, “what would happen if you just did it for a set period of time? Say, six months?”

And then the reasoning begins – the justifications for staying in the life I can’t bear: I couldn’t! Imagine telling Mum and Dad! I might live with my parents but I still pay rent, I still have a car to run and a phone bill to pay. I’m saving to get my own place too.

And I can’t give up my job, I’d never be able to justify it to a future employer – they’d think I was weird, unreliable, flakey. I would ruin my future and deplete my savings and I’d have to stay unemployed and living with my parents forever.

And what if I did? What if I gave up work for six months to write and realised I couldn’t do it? Couldn’t finish a novel, or my writing was terrible. And how would I know? How could there possibly be some kind of quality control in place to test if the six months had been wasted or a success?

But I’m driving home and I can’t get his questions out of my head. My mind is racing miles away from the roads, my muscles feel alive with potential. I feel like I’ve just been given access to a parallel world. And, for the first time in years, there’s a bubble of hope and excitement inflating in my chest.

By the time I’m home all I can think is, if I don’t do it now, when I have the most security and the least responsibility, when would I?

For weeks I make my secret plans. I sit in court taking notes, I draft letters to clients, I drive to and from the police station and, all the time, I’m wondering how I could make it work. The bubble of excitement in my chest is unpoppable and, the more I think of the life I could have, the bigger it grows.

I think I would be more insane not to take the risk. Writing has been the longest activity of my life, my constant source of absorption, my life-long companion. And I had savings, I could use those for rent and petrol and bills.

A six month window would put Mum and Dad’s minds at ease – it would just be an experiment that way – a small intermission from real life. And, if I started now, that gave me six months before The Festival of Writing in York. The Festival offers the chance to put your work in front of literary agents for feedback; that was that quality control I was looking for. It all came together perfectly.

I presented the idea to my parents (who were mercifully accepting and probably imagined this was the start of my breakdown) and used my last pay cheque to buy a ticket to the Festival. At the end of March I was officially unemployed and my six month writing experiment began.

I was taking the gamble at last.

Month: June 2021

The Writing Experiment (Part 2/3)