The Romanticised Lie of Writing on Holiday

(And What Actually Works When It's Too Hot to Think)

There's a particular fantasy that creative people and writers of all kinds tend to carry into the summer months, and it goes something like this: a change of scenery, some distance from the relentless noise of daily life, a terrace or a balcony or a shaded corner of somewhere beautiful, and suddenly the words will flow in a way they simply can't at home with the emails piling up and the washing machine going and three other things demanding attention before lunch. The holiday, the theory goes, is when the real magic will happen.

I've believed this fantasy myself, and I'm here to tell you that it's, at best, a half truth.

The part that's true is that stepping away from routine genuinely does create mental space that's difficult to manufacture at a desk you've sat at every day for the past three years, and there's real value in that. Distance from the familiar loosens things up in ways that can be useful for writing, particularly for the kind of reflective or creative work that gets squeezed out by the relentlessness of a full schedule. If you've been meaning to think properly about a project, a book, an idea that keeps surfacing and then getting buried again, a change of environment is genuinely useful for exactly that kind of thinking.

The part that's considerably less true is the notion that glorious weather is a productive writing environment, because it absolutely isn't, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either writing somewhere air-conditioned or lying. When it's thirty degrees and the fan's doing nothing except moving the hot air around the room in a more irritating pattern, and the pool or the beach or a cold drink in the shade is available as an alternative, the idea that you're going to sit down and produce coherent, considered work of any quality is optimistic to the point of being delusional.

This isn't a personal failing. Heat affects cognitive function in ways that are well documented and entirely unsurprising to anyone who's ever tried to make a sensible decision in a heatwave, and the particular kind of concentration required for writing, which involves holding multiple ideas in your head simultaneously whilst making countless small judgements about language and structure and meaning, is exactly the sort of task that suffers first. You're not being lazy, you're just warm.

What this means in practice is that the summer holiday, brilliant as it is for stepping back and thinking, is rarely the time for first drafts or complex structural work, and treating it as such is a reliable way to feel disappointed in yourself by the time you fly home or your writing window has ended. The more useful approach is to use the break for what it's genuinely good for, which is thinking, reading, noting ideas down without pressure, having the kind of conversations that feed creative work, and resting in a way that means you come back to the desk with something to say rather than an empty tank.

Early mornings before the heat builds are genuinely productive writing windows if you're somewhere warm, and the same is true of evenings once the temperature's dropped. The brutal middle of the day isn't for writing, it's for doing the thing you came on holiday to do, and there's no version of that you should feel guilty about. Of course if you’re in the UK currently you’ll have noticed that it seems to be getting hotter the more the day wears on, which means early mornings are definitely for the win.

The other thing worth acknowledging is that rest isn't the enemy of creativity, even though the culture around work would sometimes have you believe otherwise. Coming back from a break with a clearer head, a fuller perspective and a genuine sense of having been somewhere other than your desk isn't wasted time, it's the investment that makes the next phase of work better than it would've been without it. Just set a plan in action, before you go away, clear a new writing space for yourself or block out time in your calendar to actually work on your book when home.

My advice now, take the holiday, sit in the shade, drink something cold, and write nothing for a week if that's how you feel, because the words will be there when you get back, and if you've rested properly, so will you.