Are you due for a DIY retreat? How to know
Published: October 29, 2010
In the December 2010 issue of The Writer, Seattle writer Barbara Haines Howett described ways to create your own writers retreat. A “self-retreat” close to home, she wrote, can provide valuable and relatively inexpensive benefits to writers. In the following sidebar, she offers a list of symptoms for knowing it’s time for such a get-away.
When to go:
1. When you’ve been putting product over process and are fed up with the business of marketing and rejections. I had gotten mired in promoting my published work and had a need to get back to that person who puts words on paper.
2. When you’ve been away from your project and are trying to get back in. Last year, I directed a play I’d written and needed to refocus.
3. When your private life is eclipsing your writing time and you feel blocked or written dry.
4. When the weather is getting to you and you wish you could go to Hawaii.
5. When unexpected opportunities arise. Mine have been a prolonged power outage, the installation of new floors in my house, and the need to research a location I wanted to use as atmosphere and background.
6. When you can’t quite recover from the flu, your best friend got the grant you wanted, or one of your students won a writing contest you had also entered.
7. When you start deep revision on a manuscript, or it’s time to set short- or long-term goals and evaluate old ones.
8. When you must stop putting off research and get on with it. (Tip: Wait until you have a first draft completed, then you will see what information you really need and won’t waste time on what you don’t.)
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