Why You Never Feel Like You Get Anything Done in the Summer
But you actually do
I always have lofty ideas for my summer self.
For a substantial amount of writers, certainly, those that reside in academia or that teach high school, each summer stands before us a beacon of light, a designated carved out time for writing (between vacations and gardening, of course), for getting really into the project we were barely able to touch during the semester — for, FINALLY, time to write. Summer seems key, and I often tell people that the summer and winter breaks are when I get real work done. But when I reflect back, I’ve done probably more work during the school year than in the summers for the majority of recent years. I edited two novels in the thick of the semesters because of deadlines, getting up an extra hour early for several weeks. The last large project I finished in the summer was years ago when I only had one child and she was at camp. What stands out more in my mind about summers is not how much work I’ve been able to do, but, as the summer wanes, the feeling that I should have done more over the summer.
This is not a new feeling, and I remember confessing it to my own writing mentor in graduate school. She listened, looked at me thoughtfully, and advised me to make a list every August of everything I had done over the summer, including…
