Writing Retreats?

[Craft - XIV]

Small increments, daily.

I like the idea of a writing retreat. But not for writing. At least not large project.

Writing retreats, despite their name, are most often journaling retreats. Which is fine. Crafting a large writing project that takes, say, over 500+ hours, is hardly something that can be crammed into a 48 hour retreat. And if you split the 500 hours up into 48 hour increments, and plan 10 or more retreats, each of them a cram session, it still wouldn’t work. You’d go mad and hate the project before completion.

Writing retreats are an uninterrupted time of capturing where you (or your project) are right now, this weekend. They are a snapshot of a moment, a day, or a weekend. They are closer to journaling.

Writers that take the craft seriously, write. Every day. One or two or four hours. And in the course of a year or more, they finish a big, audacious project.

All craft takes time.
Not condensed.
Not crammed.
But everyday, stretched over long periods of time.

And over a year or more the small, steady investment becomes something big and beautiful. (Too big and beautiful to fit into a weekend!)