Before we get to some thoughts on writing retreats, I want to remind you of the free storytelling offering for underrepresented voices (you can also read more it about here). It starts April 18 in Carrboro, N.C. Local folks, please circulate widely!
I started going on writing retreats after I complained to a friend how hard it was to get writing done while holding down a 9-5 job (at the time I was working at UNC). She sent me a link to a long list of retreats. I fired off an application to Wildacres and to my surprise was accepted. A few months later, I spent a week in a cabin in the woods, and discovered the magic — and terror — of writing retreats.
The great thing about retreats is the uninterrupted time to focus your brain and heart one creative project. The tricky things about retreats? The uninterrupted time to focus your brain and heart on one creative project.
I’m about to head out for a 5 day retreat and am currently in the freak out stage. No matter how many retreats I go on, I always have a mini-panic before I set out. Going away from your life to focus on your art is scary! Not to mention a lot of work—it’s a measurable effort to take off work, get coverage for household and care-giving duties, and in some cases convince the people around you that time away really matters to you and your creativity. And then, once you’re worn out from those efforts, your (my) gremlins show up asking a whole bunch of nasty questions:
Do you really think your writing matters enough to miss work/family stuff?
What if you get there and are completely paralyzed?
What if you are able to look at your writing but then you discover it is SO BAD there is NO WAY you could possibly ever salvage it?
My gremlins are loudest at the moment I set off—right after I finish going through the mental checklist and decide ah yes it’s ok I remembered to pack everything—that’s when the real fun starts. As some of last year’s Jupiter attendees admitted, that moment when you realize oh god I’m leaving everything behind to be with my art is, uh, a fun one.
And although I can’t avoid the freak out part of the retreat process, I’ve been through it enough times to know it’ll pass. Once I arrive at a retreat and unpack my seltzer and sweatpants, I find my way to the work.
Before we get into exactly how I do that, I want to take a slight detour for those of you thinking well la di da isn’t it nice you get to ditch your life for five days. Yes, yes it is. It’s an incredible privilege to have the flexibility and resources to do this. Aaaaaaaand there are ways to create mini-retreats with less time and money.
Go to a coffee shop or the library, a hotel room or a friend’s place.
The best thing about a retreat is it’s not your house, a place where there are nine million things that need to be done and it’s way harder to relax and/or prioritize your art in the face of those things. But that’s why coffee shops are so great—your laundry is not in the coffee shop. Don’t want to pay five bucks? Go to the library! Even an hour in a place that isn’t your home or office can allow for some juicy focus and writing time.
If you have a little more time and money, you could stay in a hotel for a night or two (they have fridges! and gyms!). I have a lot of friends who go to hotels for their creative getaways. If that’s out of your budget, trade places for a weekend with another friend who’s a creative. In their place, you’ll be less distracted and vice versa. (Added bonus: if pets are involved, they are also taken care of!).
If you read book acknowledgements closely, you’ll notice places that writer snuck off to—in addition to famous residences like Yaddo or MacDowell, you will see thanks going to friends who lent bedrooms (and/or provided childcare.)
The options are myriad. When I lived in Chicago, I decided I could run a pretty successful writers retreat on the top floor of the Macy’s on State Street where the furniture showroom was full of comfy couches and basically deserted for most of the day. (Did I ever go there to write? You tell me).
Now, let’s talk about the panic. During every writing retreat I’ve been on, I have a period in which I feel completely stumped and hopelessly panicked. I wonder WTF I was thinking writing this thing, believing I could ever coherently tell a story that would interest anybody besides my cats. For ten minutes, an hour, or—god forbid—an afternoon, I am convinced there’s no way through. The story, and me, are hopeless. I might as well become a (very bad) accountant.
I now see the losing my shit portion of the retreat as completely inevitable. Here are my antidotes:
I bring at least one craft book, which usually has a few pages on artistic doubt and an accompanying pep talk.
I reread parts of the project that, even if they are still rough, contain the characters and events I love. This inspires me enough to calm down and keep going.
I go for a goddamn walk. You know how many problems can be solved with a walk? Most of them. While I’m on retreat, I take approximately 9,000 walks.
Besides finding a place and fending off the gremlins, I do have a lot of other concrete strategies for getting the most out of my retreat experience.
Come with a handful of specific goals. When I set out for a residency, my plan is more specific than “work on my book.” With that goal, I sit down and have no idea where to begin. For this retreat, I (currently) have four possible plans:
Finish revising Act I—which includes adding exposition, world building, and transitions—and then review in its entirety.
Reread the protagonist’s Act II scenes and make notes about what needs to be addressed.
Fill in the B character’s Act II scenes, most of which are in skeleton form.
Whatever the hell I want.
If I only have 1 plan for a retreat, I panic and freeze up. It’s important to me to lay out some specific options so that if I get stuck on one road, I can jump to another. It also satisfies an adolescent part of my brain that I have never quite stilled—if I’m supposed to be working on X, I’ll rebel and take up Y. (This, incidentally, is how I started writing fiction to begin with. Take that, math class.) And in order to not feel overwhelmed, I think of the options as the buffet: nobody is expecting me to eat every dish. I’m just here to nibble on what looks appetizing.
Even if you are just ducking out for an afternoon or overnight, think in advance about how you want to use that time and give yourself some options. And if extricating yourself is so consuming that you can’t do that thinking in advance, do it on the drive over. Turn on some music (or turn it off) and think about the characters in your project and what they might need and how you might go about delivering that.
Ditch the internet. I can’t stress this one enough. I’ve had the good fortune of going on retreats where there was no internet (sometimes no cell service!). That said, this is more and more rare and certainly not the case in your neighborhood coffee shop or hotel. In that case, I rely on the internet-blocking app Freedom, which includes a feature to schedule sessions. Before I leave, I set up the sessions I need, blocking the internet for the daytime hours, giving myself a few hours at night if I want to look something up. The funny thing about the internet is if you can get yourself to take a break, when you return, you realize there isn’t a ton of really interesting stuff online. Certainly not as interesting as your writing.
Bring lots of books. I always bring way more books to a retreat than I’ll ever need, but I bring a ton because I don’t know what sort of mood I’ll be in and what will support me. I bring craft books, fiction that may or may not have anything to do with what I’m working on, research-type books that might be useful to the project, and a slim volume of poetry or lyric memoir if I need a language jump start.
Pack the right tools. I bring a very specific set of tools to retreats:
Printed pages, because I like to hold them in my hand and mark them, because looking at printed pages turns on a different part of my brain, because you can put them on the ground, move them around, even cut them up.
Notebooks, because no matter what stage of revision I’m at, I inevitably need to write some fresh stuff, which I always do by hand in a notebook—it produces richer ideas and paradoxically gets at the story quicker than going by keyboard.
Pens of all colors and some highlighters, because the more colors and ways you mark up the page, the more fun you have, and the more fun you have, the better the writing is.
Bathrobe and slippers, because a comfy writer is a productive writer. If your retreat is in a coffee shop, you might want to skip these. On the other hand, the person wearing a bathrobe and slippers in the coffee shop is a person who will not be interrupted by anybody else.
500 liters of seltzer. Or whatever your beverage of choice may be!
Let what happens happens. The best, and sometimes hardest, part about writing is you just don’t know what the heck is gonna happen. Creativity requires a lot of faith and trust. In my day to day and especially during residency, I strive to trust the creative process, trust myself as a writer, and trust my subconscious to suggest solutions to the gnarly problems I can’t seem to get past. If I can muster this trust, a lot of amazing things happen, on retreat and beyond.
And if all else fails, I take a goddamn walk.
