One weekend a quarter I go to the cheapest place I can find within a 2-hour drive and focus solely on writing – a suggestion my therapist made when I was panicking about starting a new full-time job on top of all the extracurricular commitments I’ve made to other people’s writing.
The first weekend, at a bare-bones cabin in Deception Pass State Park, I finished the novel I’d started writing during NaNoWriMo, finished some hefty rewrites of my book proposal, and listened to Word narrate my entire memoir to me so I could catch any last errors/repetition/clunky phrasing. It was an extraordinarily productive 40ish hours.
But for my Q2 retreat, which I spent at a teeny AirBnB about a mile from my house, I didn’t have any such ambitious plans. I’d just finished #1000wordsof summer, during which I’d started a new project that I hoped to turn into a novel, and I suppose I could have unearthed the first draft I finished in March, but honestly I was kind of at a loss. I turned to my husband a couple days before I left with wild eyes: “What am I going to do on my retreat? What if I just sit around and waste my own time and money because I’m an empty-headed dullard with no ideas?”
He objected to my glorification of productivity, as he always does, and then reassured me that I wouldn’t waste the time (and that I’m not an idealess mass blorping her way blindly through the writing multiverse).
And guess what? He was extremely right, as usual.
Not only did I plot out all the beats of my new project (shout out to the StC method – more on that below) but I actually had another idea for another novel on the second day! Me! The woman who once said she’d never be able to sustain an idea long enough to write a whole book, who then wrote and published that book, then wrote another memoir (and rewrote it a million times), and then said she’d never be able to invent things and people to write fiction, but then wrote a novel, and then came up with another idea, plotted that novel, and then had yet another idea! Is this what it’s like to be the kind of writer who has too many ideas and not enough time to write them all? I always thought that was a myth! Next thing you know my characters will start ‘talking to me’ and I’ll be the kind of writer who says things like “I really had no idea what my characters were going to do until they did it!” (God, please, don’t let me be that kind of writer.)
In all seriousness, I’m starting to think that all the time and energy I’ve put toward trying to write fiction over the past year is actually paying off. Who knows if the novel I finished drafting in March will ever be worth revising – although I have been reworking the beats and I’m kind of excited to revisit it in Q3 or Q4 – but what I do know is that writing it convinced me that I can actually write a whole fucking novel, and now I want to write more! The feeling I got when that latest idea popped into my head was euphoric. I felt invincible. The opposite of the way I’ve felt for most of my life.
Suffice it to say: the retreats are working and my therapist is worth every penny of my copay. They’ve majorly quelled my anxiety about fitting in my own long-form writing among work/the literary magazine I run/the Facebook groups I run or admin/pitching and writing short-form pieces/general life. I don't panic as much because I know I always have another retreat coming, so worst case I'll only be out of touch with my manuscript for three months.
Of course, the quarterly pace is only doable right now, when I don't have kids. We'll see if my husband lets me get away with peacing out for a weekend four times a year when it means leaving him to wrangle the kids alone.
But in the meantime, I’ll take what I can get.
Recent Writing:
I’ve got a funny thing for you this month! After it was rejected by Slackjaw’s humor contest, the lovely people over at Greener Pastures accepted my satirical ‘press release’ about a new ultrasound technology that shows parents the baby’s body and soul. You can read that here.
What I’m Reading:
My in-person book club is meeting back up this month for the first time since the panini! We’re reading The Great Gatsby, which was sort of ruined for me by forced overanalysis in high school English, so I’ve been enjoying revisiting it on audio.
Also, this month’s newsletter would likely not exist without Save the Cat Writes a Novel, by Jessica Brody. Sooo many of my fiction-writer friends swear by this book, but I’d never read it until my Q2 retreat, and let me tell you: it does indeed slap! The deep-dive into plot beats and how they show up in various examples across genres was incredibly helpful for this plot-challenged writer, and it was also surprisingly enjoyable to read on a sentence level. 10/10 would recommend.
A Random Joy:
There have actually been a lot of joys this past month, but the winner for me has to be the moment I frantically scribbled down a new novel idea and realized (legit tearfully) that I actually do have ideas. What a revelation and a balm for my exhausted, self-flagellating heart.
Love the retreat idea. And thanks for the book recommendation!