MY WRITING DAY
Rebecca Schiller
The author tells Lynne Hackles about writing her memoir during lockdown and through a breakdown
Lynne Hackles
Rebecca Schiller’s plan was to write her memoir, Earthed, steadily over the first six months of 2020 but life on a smallholding, lockdown and a diagnosis of ADHD meant her plans had to change.
‘My natural process is to spend a lot of time thinking, procrastinating, researching and concentrating before writing most of a book in an intense burst during the six weeks before the deadline,’ she says. ‘For this one I’d organised everything in order to be able to do three days a week on the book. However, with a focus on the mental health diagnosis and lockdown starting in March, the landscape was very different from what I’d hoped. Much of my other work was cancelled so I was pitching frantically to editors as a journalist, trying to postpone the Mothers Who Write retreats I run and picking up more individual writing coaching work too.