Why do writers go away to write? A founder of a writing retreat offers insights

Dylan Thomas retreated to a small wooden shed overlooking the water in Wales. George Orwell wrote 1984 in an isolated house on the Scottish island of Jura, and President Barack Obama left the United States altogether for a South Pacific island once owned by Marlon Brando to write his memoir. If they can, writers retreat. Even when they can’t, they retreat within their own homes. Roald Dahl’s writing retreat was a shed at the bottom of his garden. But retreats sometimes evoke images of solitude and tortured isolation, as writers grapple with the ideas and plot, but most writers will tell you that writing is hard wherever you are. Being in a retreat only removes the reasons not to write.

And what of writers who aspire to see their books standing alongside these era-defining names? In our age of self-expression, we better understand creativity as an inherent human desire, a way of connecting with our core selves, building self-love and resilience, along with launching our voices into the world. With this in mind, retreats are on the rise but with the addition of instruction from some well-known names. For people who want to find their voice without committing to a Creative Writing degree, there are online courses offering pre-recorded guidance from literary behemoths such as MasterClass and the Faber Academy in the UK that offers online creative writing courses.

Writing in Marrakech

For writers who want to combine the experience of learning with exquisite surroundings for a literary experience to connect with other writers, there are increasing numbers of retreats and masterclasses in tempting locations where writers can workshop their manuscripts and engage with some of the fundamentals of storytelling, sometimes with industry professionals and other writers, such as the one offered at Le Sireneuse on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, or the Wendy Rohm Writing Retreat in Paris.

When we at Silk Road Slippers wanted to go about setting up what we consider our dream writing masterclasses, we considered every aspect of what we could offer to distinguish ourselves. As two editors and two writers, led by Alexandra Pringle the former Editor-in-Chief of Bloomsbury Publishing who has published writers including Margaret Atwood, Khaled Hosseini, Elizabeth Gilbert, Kamila Shamsie and Jhumpa Lahiri, we thought long and hard about what we could bring to the table. A fair amount it turns out, along with decades of industry experience.

At the Silk Road Slippers Masterclasses in Marrakech, a small group will learn the craft of storytelling – wherever they are in their writing process – from a team of writers and editors along with Booker-winning author Shehan Karunatilaka and Nobel Laureate in Literature Abdulrazak Gurnah at the exquisite Jnane Tamsna, a boutique hotel in a palm oasis. Allowing for a more straightforward visa process than Europe for several aspiring writers in South Asia, we wanted a location rich in cultural heritage and natural beauty to startle the senses, we wanted the cultural richness and natural beauty which drew the greats of the Beat generation such as Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac to Morocco in the 1950s.

A guided retreat is about giving the writing respect, structure and personalised attention. Especially to debut writers who want to understand how to navigate the craft. The biggest perk of being a writer, the freedom to create under no pressure or orders from colleagues or superiors, is also the biggest drawback. Too much freedom can ultimately be paralysing. The risk, unless a writer has an extraordinary reserve of discipline – Toni Morrison wrote while in full-time work in the mornings before her children woke up – is that writing becomes a secondary task to fit around all the others, and then eventually falls by the wayside.

A stubborn corrosive belief about writing is that the occupation is a sort of mystical calling in which a writer purely channels ideas, rather than creates them and then puts them together in a process that is closer to carpentry than it is to magic. The increasing popularity of retreats comes also from a greater awareness that writing can be taught, that it can be broken down into foundational steps such as how to structure a story, how to create interesting characters, and how to be your own editor in the redrafting process. As industry insiders, ours have the added component of throwing light on the publishing process – how to pitch your manuscript to an agent or a publisher and what to expect.

Why retreat to write

But it’s not all about the technical drudgery. Retreats are also about inspiration, stimulation, and a sense of community. There is a reason why retreats are in areas of outstanding natural beauty. In order to marshal the resolve to get back to the writing table, the diversions cannot be the mundane chores and routines of our daily lives, or the distractions that pull one away from a manuscript. A walk, a swim, or even a sit down in tranquillity and beauty unlock something that one can rarely find in the course of normal life.

When immersed in writing, writers seek one another out for advice and ideas, and to share frustrations. Letters from classic writers from their writing desks have become part of the literary canon itself. Jane Austen, over her lifetime, wrote over 3,000 letters. This is why a popular choice for new writers is a group retreat, under some form of instruction, during which writers can pool resources and benefit from each other, and then withdraw to their spaces. A group retreat combines the three essential benefits of dedicating a separate location and forgoing familiarity. The technical aspects of writing – discipline, structure, form, clarity and coherence, the stimulation of fellow travellers, and the serenity of location.

Writing is unlike any other occupation, but the challenges it poses are ultimately, like all art, for those who are lucky to have the talent and skill, also have their own reward. Because in the end, the triumph is not in producing a piece of writing, but in becoming a writer.