Recently I returned from a vacation of sorts. I live in the misty chill of the San Francisco Bay Area – on an island near San Francisco actually – but once a year I make a pilgrimage to Utah to ski with some high school friends from Florida. Florida and snow skiing seems a stretch, but it’s what we do. Mostly, these trips are just to hang out and ski, and as we have drifted apart in other ways, this is the one consistent annual event in all of our lives. In any case, long experience has taught me that there will be little creative writing done during the annual ski trip. There will be banter, drinking, over-eating, and of course skiing, but little writing.

Yet as I think back over the week just spent sitting in a Subaru named “Scoobie” on the way to Alta, Solitude, Brighton and Park City ski resorts, and the hours spent riding silent ski lifts through steady snowfalls, I see that the writing was never far away and that all my literary ambitions benefitted by the break. Routines for writers are good, don’t misunderstand that, but at times just getting away from the writing table gives you a new perspective on writing in general and on specific scenes in particular. Vida Winter, the fictional writer in The Thirteenth Tale tells her biographer, Margaret, that writing comes from the composting of the writer’s life. Well, a ski trip with friends you’ve known for over twenty years definitely is filled with compost – believe me on that one.

So don’t be afraid to take a break or go off on a little adventure and see what happens. Take along a notebook for writing down thoughts and imaginings (I’m never without one) but leave your expectations and plans at home and just see what happens. You may find that you do some of your best writing while not writing.