After the Writing Retreat Ends

Since we began leading scholarly writing retreats in 2012, opportunities across the United States have flourished. Writers are attending retreats at their home institutions, through their disciplinary organizations and with independent companies.

Retreats are increasingly popular because they meet authentic faculty needs: dedicated time to focus on writing, connection with a writing community and opportunities to learn and practice new writing skills. Our retreat participants report that they re-engaged with their writing, met new colleagues and made real progress on projects.

But as each retreat nears its end, alongside a buoying sense of hope, camaraderie and accomplishment, worry creeps in. How will writers keep up momentum on their projects once they return to real life? Summer, with all its promise, also brings its own tumult: children on break, work projects to catch up on, long-delayed doctor appointments and exercise regimens, home and kin keeping, maybe even a vacation or rest? When fall semester approaches, so do preparations for it, along with the rueful feeling about what more could have been done with the time. Once the semester begins, well, there’s always next summer’s retreat.

If you want to stay productive outside of the writing retreat, there’s a lot of good advice. Hold a weekly meeting, schedule writing times, develop strategic plans, create writing-day plans or participate in writing sprints and writing groups.

But for many writers, these productivity strategies are not enough to sustain their writing practice. At our retreats, we help writers to carry what felt so good about the retreat into their everyday writing lives. You may not be able to attend retreats regularly, but you can notice and conjure up some of the conditions that retreats make possible for you.

Whether you’ve been to a retreat or always dreamed of what it might do for you, here are some ways to bring key elements of the supportive retreat experience into your regular writing practice.

Connect with your work. In your regular writing practice, it can be hard to just get started, especially when it’s been a while since you worked on a project. It’s tempting to instead resort to waiting or planning. But waiting and planning leave you more disconnected from your work. Over time, you may feel increasing apprehension about writing and build up escalating standards for anything you do.

Retreats help writers get started because they eliminate any reason to wait. Now is the time. We begin each retreat by encouraging writers to find one next step in a project and take action. Often, the step seems so small, even too small to count­­­—such as “find the file,” “review the grant guidelines” or “pick just one project on the list.”

We call this “orienting yourself to your work.” It’s not just about naming and focusing on a task—a common, helpful productivity technique. It entails asking yourself questions like: Where are you in this work? What’s next? Arrive in the work, meet it honestly—where it is, as it is—and take the next small step.

We also encourage writers to truly connect to what interests them about their work. For many writers, productivity techniques are insufficient to engage them with the ideas and issues that excite them about their work. Most of us didn’t become scholars just so that we could tackle long to-do lists. We are motivated by questions. We teach writers to bring that energy into their regular writing practice.

Try this: Rather than starting a writing session by naming a task, turn the task into a question. For instance, rather than telling yourself to write the methodology section, you might ask, “How did we select the cases we used in this comparative analysis?” Rather than focusing on filling in the footnotes on page 28, ask, “What are the most relevant sources about the main ideas on this page?” Questions animate your writing practice and bring renewed curiosity and energy to the work at hand.

Connect with others. Retreats offer writers a chance to work in the company of others. However, proximity does not automatically create community or a meaningful connection. Connection to others, not just dedicated writing time, is what supports many retreat goers. When we really take the time to share and listen and learn about our colleagues’ work, we can ask questions about the substance of each other’s projects and be engaged listeners for each other. We can be inspired by others’ projects and may see relationships with our own. Connecting with others reminds us we are part of a larger scholarly community even as we work individually on our own projects.

At our retreats, we not only invite writers to connect with their own work, but also to talk with others about what connects them to theirs. Which ideas do they find interesting, and why? What draws them to this work? What are they trying to think about, to express or to understand through their project? What’s their why? We build connections with one another through the substance of our work, not just the outputs.

Similarly, we encourage writers to connect over the shared pleasures and challenges of writing. Good retreats create space for writers to speak honestly about how it’s going and to provide authentic support. Rarely do writers need pat advice. Instead, they need one another—and a sense that they are in this work together.

Try this: Form writing groups at which you share your ideas and your writing experiences. Multidisciplinary and/or multi-institutional groups work very well for this kind of connection, because writers quickly discover that many writing challenges are not unique to their fields. Outside perspectives can bring fresh insight. Don’t just count words, publications and grant funding. And listen more than you talk. Invest your attention in one another’s questions and projects and truly root for your peers.

Be curious. At retreats, writers often feel a greater capacity to notice and observe what happens when they write because they have a dedicated block of time just for writing, often with others who also are trying to meet their own writing goals. They might have a greater willingness in retreats to face challenges as problems to solve, things to figure out.

When we get stuck in our work as writers, curiosity reframes a writer’s block or a moment of uncertainty as a problem to figure out. It helps us shift from “This should be working!” to “What if I tried another approach?” Curiosity gives us permission to experiment and not have it all figured out already. Curiosity can help us shift from frustration to possibility.

At our retreats, we help writers to notice when they get stalled and to see those moments as occasions for curiosity and experimentation. What is happening? What do I think must happen or how things ought to go? What story am I telling about myself? (Not “I should be writing more, faster; I lack discipline; if only I had written more this semester …”) What if I tried a different approach or technique?

Try this: To include curiosity in your writing practice, take time to pay close attention to what’s happening when you write. When you feel stalled or uncertain, ask the magic question “What am I trying to figure out?” Create the space in your writing practice to slow down, notice what’s arising and name the issues. When you do this, you reframe writing challenges as a regular part of the work rather than some personal failing or another reason to wait for the perfect conditions.

Generate momentum. The immersive environment of a retreat often helps writers to generate momentum in their work. But that momentum can flag once the retreat ends and life sets in—you may write in shorter writing sessions and more time may pass between them. To initiate a similar experience of momentum in your regular writing practice, be intentional about how you manage the time between writing sessions. The goal: to reduce the friction entailed in starting each new writing session.

Try this: This enhanced version of the popular pomodoro technique recommends “parking on the downslope.” At the end of each writing session, write down where you are leaving off and note the first thing you will do the next time that you work on this. (Advanced move: park on the downslope by asking yourself the next question you need to answer when you work on the writing project again.) Parking on the downslope builds connections between and across your writing sessions in ways that can, with practice, give you that feeling of momentum that you generate with ease in the retreat environment.

Parking on the downslope works because it energizes your writing practice—you don’t start every writing session trying to figure out what to do next, which can engender decision fatigue, wheel spinning and a feeling of being overwhelmed. Similarly, retreat participants regularly report a renewed sense of energy that’s engendered by the care, connection and curiosity of the supportive environment.

We don’t have to wait for the next retreat to experience the benefits of a retreat: to connect with ourselves, connect with one another, be curious and generate momentum. When we move beyond just what we accomplished at a summer writing retreat—words generated, sections drafted, work submitted—to noticing how the retreat supported us and our work, we can bring our retreat experiences into our everyday writing practice throughout the entire year.