Tomorrow after lunch I am loading up the car and heading westards for 30 miles or so, to wall myself up in a holiday let so I can get some serious wordage done on my next book. I hope to come home next Saturday with 40,000 or 50,000 words clutched to my fever’d brow. By then I should have written all the words to the book, though not necessarily in the right order.

But is it a good strategy, to go away to write? With previous books I have found it so – sometimes you have to put away all distractions and get on with it. Not everyone agrees, though. One Roger C. Parker cites going away to write as one of the 11 biggest mistakes a first-time writer can make. “Write a little each day rather than ‘going away’ to write your book,” he says.

“Commit to write 45 minutes a day. This reduces stress and continuously reengages your subconscious mind. Stress is an author’s biggest enemy. When you attempt marathon writing, you’re putting an unrealistic burden on yourself. What happens if I come back and my book isn’t written??”

He does have a point. I don’t think I’d ever go away to start a book from scratch. The book concerned is, actually, mostly done, but I have got to a point when it deserves more attention than I can give it in the three or four hours I can usually manage, during commutes.

Neil Gaiman, though, would disagree. “I like going away to write,” he says.

“I like waking up with nothing in my head. I like (when I’m working on a book, especially when I’m starting it) not to talk to anyone. To enter a world in which the book is more real than the world.”

But then Gaiman is hardly the starry-eyed first-timer to whom Parker was addressing his comments; neither is Kerry Madden, author of historical fiction: “I love going away to write because the distractions of family life melt away, but I usually write in my office in our house until the kids come home from school.”

Getting away from distractions is important. I have quite a few (work, family, zillions of animals) but probably fewer than those which beset Samuel Pepys, who was of course able to write while in the thick of it. Here is part of his diary entry for 25th February 1666.

“He says the Archbishopp of Canterbury hath been very kind to him, and hath plainly said to him that he and all the world knows the difference between his judgment and brains and the Duke of Albemarle’s, and then calls my Lady Duchesse the veryest slut and drudge and the foulest worde that can be spoke of a woman almost. My Lord having walked an houre with me talking thus and going in, and my Lady Carteret not suffering me to go back again to-night, my Lord to walke again with me about some of this and other discourse, and then in a-doors and to talke with all and with my Lady Carteret, and I with the young ladies and gentle men, who played on the guittar, and mighty merry, and anon to supper, and then my Lord going away to write, the young gentlemen to flinging of cushions, and other mad sports; at this late till towards twelve at night, and then being sleepy, I and my wife in a passage-room to bed, and slept not very well because of noise.”

Please, no, not the soft cushions.

I’ll see you all when I get home.