Retreat

The words come in fits and starts. Some days I manage a paragraph, others a page or two, but it seems the days of writing 2000 words or more a day are gone, lost in the grind of work, music, personal drama.

I know they aren’t gone, those magical days where the words come and don’t stop coming, where they pour from my mind like well-mixed pancake batter. But for now, I’m slogging through the first draft of a new manuscript and pulling words from my head is, as a writer friend recently said to me, “Like pulling out my own teeth through my nose.”

So, when faced with a four-day weekend for Independence Day, I decided to pack up my camping gear, my dog, and my notebook and go on my own writer’s retreat.

I sat in the woods for three days with a notebook and a pen in my hand and let myself get bored for the first time in a very long time.

It’s difficult to be bored these days and boredom is as much a necessary part of creation as dedication and perseverance. But with an entire library of games, books, magazines, and podcasts on my phone, not to mention Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, whenever I feel a twinge of boredom, I turn to my devices and get lost in them for hours.

So I took myself out into the woods, let my phone die, and made myself embrace the boredom. And I wrote. It was tough going at first, but by the end of my D.I.Y retreat, I didn’t want to leave the woods. I wanted to stay there and write until I finished the draft of my book.

I haven’t been able to maintain the momentum I achieved over my little retreat. This week has been busy for all it was a three day work week, but I’m not beating myself up for not having written as much as I might have liked, which is a nice change in mentality.

And now I know that I can go away for a weekend and make my own mini writer’s retreat and it doesn’t have to be anything fancy or expensive. It could just be a tent in the woods.

I think from now on, I’m going to try to schedule time for boredom and hopefully, that will enable me to write.

Thank you for reading.

What are your strategies for sparking the creative process?