MacLeod found that his university duties left little time for creative writing. "One time correcting all my papers and putting circles around "their" and "there" and "they're"," he told a radio interviewer, "I began to think that maybe this wasn't the most worthwhile thing I should be doing with my life and so I said...I'm going to try to write like imaginatively or creatively for two hours a day." The experiment failed, however, because MacLeod found that by the end of each day, he was too worn out from his academic work to produce stories that were any good. So, he did most of his writing during the summer breaks when his family lived on the MacLeod homestead at Dunvegan, Cape Breton. He would spend mornings there "writing in a cliff-top cabin looking west towards Prince Edward Island."