A Change is as Good as a Rest – Writing and Research Trip to Sri Lanka

People sometimes ask me why I enjoy writing retreats.

Surely you can write just as easily at home, or in a library or coffee shop? Isn’t it an unnecessary indulgence to travel somewhere else simply to sit with your imagination and put words on a page?

Perhaps it is. But in my experience, a change of place can open creative floodgates that had previously been firmly closed.

I’m writing this beside a palm‑fringed beach in Sri Lanka. I’ve been working all morning.

On palm‑fringed Sri Lankan beaches, you ask?

Afraid not. I’ve been transported back to 1907 — to a doctor’s surgery in Dorking.

So, wouldn’t I have been better off making a much cheaper trip to Dorking? (For my international readers that’s Dorking in Surrey England, a town southwest of London just outside the M25 orbital motorway.) 

No! Until I got to Sri Lanka I had no plan to write about Dorking! In fact, I had no idea what I was going to write. I’d sent the manuscript of the last novel in my Hearts of Glass trilogy to my editor the day before I left, and the slate was blank.

I’ve only been to Dorking once – funnily enough to buy food supplies for another writing retreat nearby. Where, of course, I didn’t write about Dorking, but began a book set in Hampshire and London! I did borrow the house we were staying in and turned it into Bankstone which features in all three of my Hearts of Glass books (The Artist’s Apprentice, The Artist’s Wife and The Artist’s War). 

I’m being slightly disingenuous here as I am writing about Sri Lanka – or rather Ceylon as it was then – but having written two paragraphs inspired by the scenery and ambience of the tea plantation I was staying on last week, I realised I needed to dip back to Dorking to develop the back story that would get my characters here in the first place. 

I suppose what I’m saying, in a roundabout way, is that there’s a difference between seeking inspiration and conducting research. This trip has allowed me to do both.

Here at the beach, I’m hammering away at my laptop with no mention of sun‑kissed sand or soaring temperatures. But the absence of everyday distractions, the steady sound of the waves (it’s a popular surf spot), and the occasional fruit smoothie or cold beer all help get my fingers moving across the keyboard. Besides, it’s far too hot to do anything else.

The trip has also served me well as research. During four days in the hills I was photographing tea plantations, drinking endless cups of tea, talking at length with a retired tea planter, touring a tea factory, visiting a nineteenth‑century golf club built by the British and virtually unchanged since, calling in at an old colonial club, and staying in a beautifully restored planter’s bungalow built in 1925.

In that sense, this has very much been a working holiday — albeit in a rather fabulous location. It’s not so different from some of the business trips I made in a former life, when I was lucky enough to run workshops in a game reserve in Africa, generate ideas with clients in Singapore and New York, or talk strategy in the middle of the New Forest.

Why should it be any harder to justify as an author?

Affordability is, of course, another matter. I recognise that not every writer can disappear to the other side of the world to get a book off the launchpad. But the principle still holds. A change of scene doesn’t have to be expensive: a park, a café, a friend’s house, a museum or gallery, or a short break somewhere manageable can be enough to shift perspective.

This trip has been a solo one, which has its advantages. There are fewer distractions, and no guilt if I decide to write for hours at the expense of sightseeing. Non‑writing holidays can then be proper holidays — though as a writer, I’m always mulling something over.

Next month I have another writing retreat, this time in France, and with half a dozen writer friends. I’ll probably get less writing done, but there will be plenty of writerly talk: help wrestling with plot problems, shared marketing wisdom, and, most importantly, camaraderie over generous quantities of wine. Writing is a solitary business, so time with others who follow the same calling is always rewarding.

My final night in Sri Lanka will be spent in Colombo at the Galle Face Hotel. I plan to drink a cocktail while watching the sun set. Those who have read A Painter in Penang and Jasmine in Paris may remember this grand old colonial hotel — where Evie and Jasmine stayed en route from Kenya to Penang, and where Jasmine’s story eventually concludes. When I wrote those scenes, I’d never visited the hotel myself.

I’m keen to see how imagination compares with reality.

Time for a fruit cocktail?

POST SCRIPT - since writing that post I ended up deleting everything I'd written about Dorking! To find out why, read my post A False Start