A Writing Retreat of My Own: Lessons Discerned
12,309, minus 10%, and 40% = the nonsensical quantifications of a retreat; the rest makes more sense.
12,309 words
That’s how many “new words” I wrote during my nine-day retreat. That’s not counting anything I wrote in the sidebars of Scrivener, where one gives titles to chapters and sections and writes notes and synopses. That’s the main quantitative result of the retreat. Let’s talk about the qualitative results. Some of these may seem obvious, but living and learning is, in fact, different from comprehending others’ experiences and others’ advice. Real experience yields real lessons.
I took notes on my daily activities: what time I woke up, when was the tea ready and I started writing, what I did hour by hour, and notes to myself about what I was thinking and feeling about this work. I followed the self-prescribed schedule fairly well, though I learned I don’t need an entire hour for weightlifting; when one is as out of shape as I, one must ease oneself back into weightlifting.
By the second day, a realization sunk into my bones: a good schedule lessons anxiety. Here’s what I wrote in my notes:
No anxiety because I know I did worthwhile work during its allotted time. Instead of worrying all day about whether I’m working on the right project for the right amount of time, I was sure I was doing what I could during the allotted time. The rest of the time in the day was for me to enjoy.
You can stop reading now and be satisfied that you have read the most important lesson.
Good habits
I developed good habits: I eat only at the dining room table and never at my desk and I feel 10% less barbaric. I also now do the dishes after every meal rather than leave them in the sink to stack up for a big evening wash. Why? Because I allotted plenty of time for a meal, more time than I need to cook and eat it, so there was no rush to get on to the next thing on the schedule. Here’s what I wrote in my notes:
It felt good taking my time doing these things [walking Ande, weightlifting, doing laundry] because I know I did all the writing I could today.
That realization came on the first day.
The other good habit arrived on the last day. Realizing that I was going back to “Ordinary Time”1 (thanks to my Catholic upbringing, I know how to divide time, which is a handy trick) after the retreat, I spent the last day organizing and outlining. The best, most useful, most helpful document I created is called, “NEXT TO DO,” which I made especially for the very likely scenario in which I do not come back to this project for so many days that I forget where I was in it. It lists three clear actions I can take immediately to get back into the swing of the project.
Connection
More than once—okay, 30% of the days, okay, 40%—I noted how much I liked Ande laying under the desk and touching my feet with her feet or her chin. A solo retreat with a dog could be my greatest invention. Yet I found myself wanting to share with a human being an interesting idea or a sentence I thought I had written well. Maybe I’ll ask a friend to join me next time. I’ll have to ask Ande if that would be okay, because she had walks, scratches, treats, and snuggles practically on demand.
Disconnection
I had fair-to-middlin’ success with disconnecting; I had planned on only one hour in the evening to check social media and to text, but too easily the phone crawled into my hands during lunch or during a break.
The little red dot on an app is designed to grab your brain, and once your brain is grabbed, you are no longer thinking about your stuff, you are thinking about someone else’s. It helps enormously to turn off all notifications, so that no little red numbers appear anywhere. Having those little buggers off makes it easier to remember that opening an app and looking for something ought to be a conscious choice. There’s no such thing as “just a quick peek.” Once you give your attention away, it’s gone and it takes a while to recover it.2 I believe that opening an app should mean that you are choosing to be distracted and/or are willing to act on what you find there; if you aren’t, then don’t open it.
Don’t let the seeming confidence of the previous paragraph fool you; I still have a ways to go before I’m existing in a day-to-day life wherein I own my phone rather than my phone owns me. Besides, it’s exciting to click on an app not knowing if there’s anything new there for me—and I’m hoping that each time a click leads to nothing new will dissuade me from clicking on it again.
One doesn’t need as much as one would think
As I kept daily notes, I added how many words got written in the first hour or hour-and-a-half. Because I had scheduled three hours every morning for writing and I couldn’t sit still for more than an hour, I wanted to find out if I was doing enough in the first “push” of the morning, and then I’d know what minimum could keep me writing after the retreat. After an hour, I’d usually get up to make a second pot of tea, even if too much tea can lead to more restlessness. After two-and-a-half hours, I was usually done for the morning, though that last half-an-hour to organize for the next writing session was fun.
One day I captured 952 words in the first hour-and-a-half. That was exceptional, however, and more normal was 200-500 words. If I write 200 words every morning, that’s 1,000 words a week, if 500, then 2,500. The math is intoxicating.
Still, I couldn’t help wondering—yes, in my daily notes—if 200 words in the first hour as a minimum isn’t because those words arrived during a writing retreat when whole days were dedicated to writing. I could, after all, think about this one project in the non-writing time slots, instead of having to answer emails in the non-writing time slots as during Ordinary Time. Well, I have a partial answer to that musing. In the days after the retreat I have continued to take daily/hourly notes and I have still been productive and during the first hour or so.
Retreat Day +1 (i.e., One Day After the Retreat): drew ideas (I’m a visual thinker.)
Retreat Day +2: wrote 601 words in the first 1 1/2 hours.
Retreat Day +3: wrote 731 words in the first 2 hours (that would be for this Substack).
You don’t want a pithy conclusion full of advice you’ll never heed, do you? Don’t you want your own writing retreat to live and discern your own lessons? Or maybe you want to talk about your best writing retreat, fantasy or real? Leave me a comment, please, so I know how to design future writing retreats for myself and to host at A Good Spot one day; a “Writing Retreat With Your Pet” would be a winner, wouldn’t it?! What other “different” retreats would appeal to you? A cabin in the woods?
Not quite ordinary Ordinary Time—it is still sabbatical for me!
https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/you-2-0-deep-work/ Thanks go to
for this link to a podcast called, “You 2.0: Deep Work.”
You have me thinking. I tend to be a scattered thinker/worker and am all to easily distracted from projects or goals I set for myself. I am so very guilty of peeking at social media for "just a moment," to realize that I count too many half hour moments! I do allow my device to steal my time too readily. Sometimes I wonder whether I am not venturing into "should" land, do this, study that, because I should, vs. working with or toward something I really am genuinely interested in doing. You are inspiring some self-reflection and have been helpful by sharing your lessons. Thank you! And how wonderful that you have already developed good habits. Brava!
Cabin in the woods retreat would definitely appeal to me. That cabin in the picture, for sure