#58: Tips for a Successful Writing Retreat (and How to Make One at Home)

Hello friends! Happy New Year! Before we get started, a quick reminder that my “Revision, Rewriting, and Re-Visioning Writing Retreat” on the Greek island of Zakynthos still has slots available! If you’ve got a novel or memoir you’re working on and will be ready to revise or rewrite next summer, this might be a great fit for you. More info can be found at Uptrek’s website!

Tips for a Successful Writing Retreat (and How to Make One at Home)

Two things can be true at once: writers need time more than anything; writers never have enough time. Very few of us have truly abundant “free” time, our days divided between work, family and friends, community service and activism, church or other social groups, exercise and travel and dozens of other obligations, not to mention the bottomless well of content waiting to be scrolled or streamed. Even for those rare few who write as their primary profession, it’s easy to feel like not enough is getting done, or that other people are writing more and probably better.

Writers are obsessed with efficiency; efficiency is not a very good goal for writing. Still, most writers who’ve kept at it for any amount of time have found ways to squeeze writing productivity out of our days or weeks or years. For some people (this is me, most of the time), that means dedicating certain hours of certain days of the week to the work, steadily making progress alongside the rest of life. For others, it means the occasional all-night binge, bringing pent-up energy to the page and writing a whole story or a chapter from midnight to dawn. Many professors and teachers I know write only on weekends, or on breaks, or in the summer. Childcare and eldercare and other kinds of caretaking take incredible amounts of energy and offer no fixed schedule, making routine and solitude more difficult to establish, but many parents and caretakers still find a way to keep working on their projects, even if only at a glacial pace. (This was me over the past few years too.)

Which is all to say, writers are resilient and inventive but rarely get the chance to write in what feels like ideal circumstances. One solution to this quandary is the residency or retreat (two words I’ll use more or less interchangeably here, despite some differences), where a writer goes off to ...