Last week I treated myself to a do-it-yourself Writers Retreat. We used a simple setup-- 2 writers, 1 apartment, 2 nights. I will explain what happened, with the urging that all you writers and artists consider setting up something similar. It is an easy, inexpensive, and powerful way to improve your craft and finish saleable pieces.

Lee Garvin was the originator of the retreat. He suggested we go and isolate for 2 nights to an apartment in an off-season resort town to escape the distractions of real life and focus on our writing. People pay hundreds of dollars to go to writer's workshops, formal retreats, and similar. But Lee got to the essence of it:

1. Grab a colleague or two and get away from it all.
2. Write. Critique. Revise. Lather, rinse, repeat.

In two nights I ended up sorting out six years of story ideas and fragments, ultimately wrapping up 3 stories, and getting 2 killed. The slaying was the primary goal of the Retreat-- write and destroy.

See, when you submit a work to an editor (or an audience), it's pass/fail. Either it gets picked up, or it doesn't. You don't usually get a second shot. The goal of the Retreat was to cut each others' work apart, critique it and give feedback so that we could revise it, hone it, make it sing.

Ideally, we end up with stuff ready to submit to a paying venue. And instead of an editor saying "no, needs work, go away" they say "Wow, what a beautifully crafted piece, sold!"

So it is with joy that I mention Lee vetoed one story with "it's angry, but I can't tell at what", and another as needing dialog to get into the head of the main character more. In short, I have to rewrite them, massively. Which is just what I needed to hear-- and better from him than a submissions editor!

I also managed to finish a 10K word fantasy fiction piece I've had in the back of my mind for a year. I had portions written in various notebooks, some just outline, some with prose. By the end of our retreat, I had it done, done, done! Victory!

Lee was working primarily on a comedy pulp adventure script for a project of his, alternately writing, then speaking it to work out timing and see how the lines actually played. He also had some other projects that we talked about, so he can best decide where to focus his efforts. We had similar overall goals, despite the different projects and markets we were tackling.

Lee got more pages out when I was part of the process-- timing him, giving feedback after each reading, going through many rapid cycles of feedback-edit-replay. But since we only hit that groove late in the second (and thus last) day, well, we could have pushed a lot more pages out of Lee had we started in this fashion earlier.

Consider this my lesson for next time. Much as a gaming group needs a 'group contract' on goals and methods, then needs to let that evolve over time, I think any writing retreat needs to make initial goals, but also not shy away from modifying them, and even aggressively enforcing them.

My own process is to finish something, then get feedback. But different writers have different styles, so being adaptable is necessary to maximize retreat productivity for all. Next time, in addition to my own writing method, I shall focus on being more active as a cheerleader and, yes, bossy taskmasker.

I highly recommend other creators consider making their own homemade take on the classic writer's retreat. And, as someone juggling a career and raising kids along with my sideline of writing, the retreat had another benefit. It was the most selfish time I've spent in over 10 years. Two days to devote just to works I wanted to pursue. Glorious.

Until next month,
Sand