Craving Solitude to Write? Try These 8 Pandemic Writing Strategies

When the car needed service several months ago, I put on a coat and mask and went to the dealership. It wasn’t until I was waiting in the blessedly quiet customer cafe that I realized how much I’d been craving solitude. Would they notice, I wondered, if I sat here every week?

I’ve been a writer for three decades. During much of that time, I’ve been blessed with an empty house, at least during the hours the kids were at school and my husband was at work. When the pandemic caused the world to grind to a halt, my husband started working from home. We were lucky to still be employed. I knew that.

But here’s the thing: my husband is a talker who likes to have breakfast and lunch at the same time every day. With company.

Me? I like to sit alone with a cup of tea and a newspaper to get my brain in gear before writing. And lunch? I might eat a sandwich at my desk. Or not.

Another of my rituals is to walk the dogs in the morning, and again in the early afternoon. I count on those walks as moving meditations to untangle thorny plot points or plan magazine articles and interviews for my work as a ghostwriter.

Then my husband started wanting to walk with me.

A couple of weeks after he started working from home, four of our adult children and a niece fled New York City and Los Angeles for the relative safety of our rural house. Now there were bodies and laptops everywhere. I was grateful to have such a jolly quarantine crew, and felt blessed that we were all either employed or in school, albeit remotely. Nights were filled with creative cooking and cocktails and binge watching movies. Fun!

Fun, but pretty much the opposite of what a writer needs. So I had to get creative about guarding my solitude. Even now that the kids have returned to their apartments, I’m holding firm to these strategies:

• • Set up a table on your patio or balcony so you can work outside even in the chilly months. It might be worth investing in an outdoor heater if your house is crowded.
  • Look for a nearby breakfast or lunch place with outdoor tables and work while you have a meal or a pot of tea.
  • Whenever your car needs servicing, volunteer to wait at the dealership.
  • Even your car can serve as a workspace if you keep a blanket, laptop pillow, and journal in it to use whenever you’re desperate for writing (or thinking) time.
  • Learn the value of a closed door. If others don’t respect the door and barge into your space anyway, put a sign up that says “Writer at Work.” Or, even better, as a friend of mine did, put up a picture of a growling tiger.
  • Don’t have a separate office for writing? Put a chair and typing table in the laundry room. Nobody will bother you there, I promise.
  • Take a retreat. Even a weekend at a contactless Airbnb can help you put your head into a project, whether you’re starting a new manuscript or trying to finish editing one.
  • Remember that this, too, shall pass, and we’ll miss our loved ones when we have our solitude again. Maybe.
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Novelist, journalist and ghostwriter Holly Robinson is the author of The Gerbil farmer’s Daughter: A Memoir and six novels. Her articles and essays appear frequently in national publications. Learn more about Holly and her writing at https://authorhollyrobinson.com/

FOLLY COVE

An emotionally rich novel about family and secrets from the acclaimed author of Chance Harbor.

The Bradford sisters are famous in Rockport, Massachusetts: for their beauty, their singing voices, their legendary ancestors, and their elegant mother, Sarah, who has run the historic Folly Cove Inn alone ever since her husband disappeared.

The two youngest sisters, Anne and Elly, fled Folly Cove as soon as they could to pursue their dreams and escape the Bradford name, while Laura stayed and created a seemingly picture perfect life. After a series of bad decisions, Anne has no choice but to come home and face her critical mother and eldest sister, reluctantly followed by Elly, another Bradford woman who’s hiding something.

As the three sisters plan a grand celebration for their mother’s birthday, they struggle to maintain the illusions about their lives that they’ve so carefully crafted. But when painful old wounds reopen and startling family secrets are revealed, they soon discover that even the seemingly unbreakable bonds of sisterhood can be tested…

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