Rest, the Four-Letter Word

By Rosemary Johnson

You are probably familiar Bing Crosby’s Busy Doing Nothing song.  The problem is that we writers are rotten at doing nothing.  Like the singer, we are good at finding ‘things not to do’ - things we know we ought to be doing but never get around to doing.  We make New Year resolutions, which we break within a few days.  We target standards, dispensed by all those writing experts – like writing every day, for instance.  We don’t write every day.  For various reasons, we can’t.  So we feel inadequate, depressed and not a proper writer.

Certainly, there are benefits to writers writing every day, in developing fluency and maintaining cohesion, in the same way as athletes build up muscle tone and fitness levels, but don’t let's take this analogy and this mantra too far.  Footballers have close seasons, and writers have to stop sometimes.  Sometimes we have to leave our writing because we’re ill, or there’s a crisis in our family, or we’re avalanched in work, but, at other times, we just don’t.  So?  So what?  We don’t have to call ourselves lazy because we’re not banging on our computer keyboards like pistons on an express train.

Me, I am at an in-between stage now.  I finished my novel, about the Polish trade union Solidarity, during the last days of October last year and every time I opened my inbox another email from NanoWriMo jumped out at me, urging me to start another one.  Now.  I didn’t.  Apart from not having done sufficient research, it didn’t feel right to move from one setting and one set of characters to another lot.  My new characters would’ve blended into the ones in the previous book.  I needed a break.    

Writers need rest.  I know that’s a four-letter word.  I’ll say it again.  Writers need rest.  Forget the athlete in training.  If you suffer from repetitive strain injury through typing too much (as many writers do), you are advised not to use your computer for a while.  The red, stretched and taut transmitters in your brain need a little more than Deep Heat cream.  Writing becomes a habit, a way of life.  We forget how to live without writing, but, as writers, we do need to understand how the rest of the world lives.  We are no less writers for resting for a while, and, when we’re ready, we can take up it again.  We may feel a bit rusty when we restart, but our creative skills will not have withered away, but, instead, be refreshed and energised, and, probably, matured.

Genesis tells us that God rested on the seventh day.  Whether or not you believe the Creation story happened exactly as in the Old Testament (I don’t!), it is clear that God does not require us to be on the hamster wheel all the time.

After what I’ve just written above, I suppose it’s inappropriate to mention the next ACW competition – The Any Short Story Competition – especially as the graphic shows a woman at a computer.  The competition’s like it says on the tin:  we will accept any short story, up to 1000 words.  Deadline:  31 March 2019.  More information on the ACW website.

Rosemary Johnson has had many short stories published, in print and online, amongst other places, The Copperfield Review, Circa and Every Day Fiction.  In real life, she is a part-time IT tutor, living in Suffolk with her husband and cat.  Her cat supports her writing by sitting on her keyboard and deleting large portions of text.