Time to Retreat

Here are a few bits of writing wisdom I collected this year: “The condition of being a writer is the condition of being stuck” (James Wood, author and staff writer for The New Yorker). “Writing is decidedly an act of communication. We write the stories that are urgent and pressing to us. I think of writing as carrying water up the beach to a bucket, and all the time it’s slipping through my fingers.” (Claire Messud, author). “Poets are the Olympians of writing. I start every day opening the Norton Anthology of Poetry.” (Geraldine Brooks, author).

I accumulated all this wisdom this past April, when I attended my first-ever writers’ retreat (as a participant; I’ve attended a bunch as an author/panelist/speaker/workshop leader.) And my feeling about my first writers’ retreat is: Oh my God. Why did I wait so long? My week in Reykjavik at the Iceland Writers’ Retreat—surrounded by authors, writers, readers, book lovers, wordsmiths, and adventurers—did more for my writing than months of sitting alone at my desk had done. I came home with a new way to outline, several scenes for my WIP, a deeper understanding of my characters, some amazing new friendships, and renewed joy in and appreciation for the incredible undertaking involved in writing a book. Fiction, non-fiction, published, never-published, self-published, just thinking about starting a novel—we are all heroes, each and every one of us.

I admit: I signed up for the retreat mostly because I wanted a lark, and Iceland in April seemed like a good idea. I wondered if it made sense for me, since I’ve had several novels published. I don’t mean that in an I’m-all-that way. I mean that I have been writing fiction for almost 20 years and I’m not new to this. But I haven’t finished or published a novel in 10 years, which makes me, in many ways, a novice. So I went. As I said, it turned out to be invaluable for me. Here’s why I think writing retreats are a good idea for any writer at any stage of their career:

The most obvious: A good writing retreat pushes you outside of your ordinary routine and your comfort zone. I tried writing exercises that made me roll my eyes, that scared me, that delighted me. All of it made me think really hard about how I write and what I want to say.

For example, the author Helen Oyeyemi had us fill out a Proust questionnaire (a parlor game popularized by writer Marcel Proust) as one of our characters. I am not someone who writes lengthy character studies, or knows every detail of my characters’ backstories when I write. It’s not the kind of exercise I would ever ordinarily do when working on my novel. But answering questions like “What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?” “On what occasions do you lie?” and “For what in your life do you feel most grateful?” as one of my main characters gave me some rich information about the character that I hadn’t known previously. I even turned one of the answers into a scene in my current WIP.

You have a chance to practice and improve key writing skills. “If you get through the hard stuff using technique, you’ll get back to inspiration,” Nita Prose told us. Prose is a long-time editor at Simon & Schuster Canada and author of The Maid (2022), a #1 New York Times bestseller. Listen, I’m a pantser. I write character-driven fiction, and outlining is not my thing. But Prose convinced me that working on the basics—plot and structure—would help me avoid blind alleys and dead ends. She taught us a basic structure for outlining and plotting scenes. In the weeks since I returned from the retreat I have worked hard on an outline and have a much clearer grasp of my story, a grasp that has led me in some startling new directions.

You absorb a different place and culture. This was my second trip to Iceland—I spent two weeks there in 2016. Yet I was struck afresh by so many things: The incredible role nature plays in Icelandic writing, the story-telling in folk and fairy tales and what I can learn from them, how a place can permeate the way people talk and write and think, what role place and culture may have in my own WIP. “Nature is the co-author” in much Icelandic writing, one writer told us. A tour guide described the moss that covers the lava fields as “the first settler” on the landscape. In Iceland, mountains hide trolls, rocks are home to elves, and the elves themselves are the unwashed children of Eve, who she hid when God came to visit. All of it was new to me. You don’t have to travel to a foreign country to experience this: There are cultural differences between north and south, east and west, between urban and rural life, between life on the plains and life in the mountains and life on the coast and life in the desert. A retreat provides the opportunity to immerse yourself in a different way of living and thinking.

You get to be with your (our) people. At the introductory dinner the very first night, someone said to me, “This is kind of a nightmare, being around all these strangers. I bet eighty percent of us are introverts.” I laughed but thought, Hmm. That’s true. I consider myself an introvert. Yet most people I met were very willing to share their writing in workshops, to encourage each other, to be curious and brave. This introvert ended up having way too much fun at a dinner at a great Reykjavik restaurant with four women I’d just met that day at the retreat, sharing life stories on a bus ride with another retreater, and befriending a woman in my first workshop who I already have plans with in 2024. It was a wildly diverse group of people, and another step outside my usual zone.

Have you attended writing retreats? What were the most valuable take-aways for you? Do you believe retreats are essential for writers? Why or why not?

Kathleen McCleary

Kathleen McCleary is the author of three novels—House and Home, A Simple Thing, and Leaving Haven—and has worked as a bookseller, bartender, and barista (all great jobs for gathering material for fiction). A Simple Thing (HarperCollins 2012) was nominated for the Library of Virginia Literary Awards. She was a journalist for many years before turning to fiction, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, and USA Weekend, as well as HGTV.com, where she was a regular columnist. She taught writing as an adjunct professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and teaches creative writing to kids ages 8-18 as an instructor with Writopia Labs, a non-profit. She also offers college essay coaching (https://thenobleapp.com), because she believes that life is stressful enough and telling stories of any kind should be exciting and fun. When she’s not writing or coaching writing, she looks for any excuse to get out into the woods or mountains or onto a lake. She lives in northern Virginia with her husband and two daughters and Jinx the cat.

www.kathleenmccleary.com/