How Taking A Year Out Bought Back My Creative Flare

It’s amazing how academia can destroy creativity. The strain to get the best marks, the time constraints of tight deadlines, the fear of forbidding assessments. Not to mention the fact that for most people, for myself, further education isn’t just a learning curve towards a degree, it’s the time period before employment in which you’re suddenly juggling being an adult.

After a day at university, rather than coming home and collapsing onto a sofa waiting for dinner to appear magically before you, it’s a case of washing dishes, making dinner, taking out bins. Suddenly lease agreements need to be signed, and understood, council tax needs to be managed and bills are coming in from every possible direction.

Between these two strains anyone can be forgiven for losing their creative ambitions and not finding time to put fingers to keys, let alone pen to paper.

For me the constant need to get other things done, things I would deem to be ‘adulating’ in all its most boring fashions, meant that there was no time to write. During the summer holidays, when the education work load was blissfully swept away for a handful of hot months, I did try to write. All year ideas would flourish, either on my five hour round trip commute, or when I was meant to be paying attention to the drone of a lecturer, and would be jotted down quickly onto scraps of paper.

By summer each year I would have a bag of such paper scraps, some with ideas full of colour and excitement, others who’s only deserved place was the bin, and the desire to write them in full would bubble up. Yet, still the need to manage home, juggle family and be social would press in, dusted with a coat of sheer fatigue from a year of intense study, and my writing inclinations would fall again to the weigh-side.

I went from writing at least one story a week to writing none at all during my four years of further education. The few creative pieces that did manage to find a page to settle on where often rushed, and far from my best work.

As any writer will know it is the inability to write that is the most frustrating, and by the time I finally held my degree all I wanted to do was sit down with my laptop and write. I wanted to enter competitions, write short stories, self-publish a book, attempt a full length novel and read, read, read.

To my utter joy my now fiancée agreed to support me, and with the help of a nest egg of savings I was off.

During my year out I was able to enter a number of creative writing competitions, one for which I came runner-up, write a full length novel, and publish a collection of my short-stories.

I wish it could have gone on forever.

Despite all of this getting back into my creative rhythm was not easy, and certainly not immediate. It took months before I started to pen my novel, and it took having a goal of proving that I hadn’t just been sleeping and eating to push me to publish my collection. Many writing competitions came and went that I would have loved to have entered, but the need to catch up on four years of sleep came first. Then I had to battle with loneliness. For everyone who tells you that a gap-year is incredible, they don’t tell you how lonely it can be. From being with a class of people at least three times a week, to being home alone all day every day, the loneliness was crippling.

However, once everything evened out, once I had adjusted to this new way of living, my creativity started to flare. Suddenly every time I had an itch to write I could actually follow through with it. Writing was my job, my only priority and it resulted in a novel I could hold up and be proud of.

I had the bliss of time. Time to do the things I wanted to do, the work that I deemed important, and though the need to maintain the home and manage bills was still present, and somewhat getting harder as the nest-egg shrunk, it was writing that now consumed my mind.

Despite now having returned to work, with the pressing need for financial stability finally getting the better of everything else, this year of creative release has stayed with me. Rather than feeling consumed by the monotony of adult life I can allow myself moments to write and create, knowing now that the results could lead me out of a grey-life and into the life I want to live.