Pick up any book about writing, and it will give endless reams of advice about how to create the best conditions for writing productively. These include joining writers groups, making it a daily job, blogging, finding a mentor, working alone, setting up a designated area and/or time for writing, and working to a word count goal or deadline. Implicit in all this advice is that somehow writers are special creatures, who require some kind of rarified atmosphere to create, even if this is just a humble desk and filing cabinet.
Well, I’m happy to announce that I have discovered the best place to write, and it is, drum roll please, a cruise ship. As someone once quipped, cruise ships are full of the “recently wed, overfed and nearly dead”. And no-one would ever accuse them of offering high brow entertainment or attracting the world’s most cultivated travellers.
But cruise ships offer some great perks for writers and I’ve come to regard them as floating writers-in-residence programs. Once you have brought your ticket, and staggered on board, weighed down with suitcases full of seasonally inappropriate clothing, a cruise ship is a writer’s retreat. They provide food without washing; daily housekeeping and a total absence of household duties; the internet is too expensive to use, and there is no mobile phone reception, which cuts out all the usual digital distractions; and for writers with children, there is a free kids’ club which the little ones actually enjoy. Plus there is something about being in the confined space of a ship, and the sight of the ocean, which seems to focus the mind. You can’t actually go anywhere, so there is no running away from your writing project, so you may as well write.
A dear friend and I recently went on a cruise to New Zealand, and I took my laptop and an incomplete manuscript. I set myself a target of bashing out 1000 words every day, it was a 13 night cruise, and came home having written about 16,000. I’m thinking that next time I have a deadline looming, I’m going to hit the high seas.
Helen Hopcroft: an artist's life 