Why I prepped differently for this writing retreat

Last December, at the Loch Lomond retreat, I had excellent momentum on this draft of Book Four right up until the halfway point, and then hit a wall. The storylines past the midpoint simply weren’t coming together. So this time, I didn’t want to arrive at the writing retreat and discover the same problem all over again.

In the weeks before, I gave myself a dedicated focus weekend and ran it like a dress rehearsal: nine till five, Saterday through Sunday morning, the same rhythm I’d be using once I got there. The goal was to get ahead of the structural problems before I was sitting at the table with everyone else.

It helped. But it didn’t solve everything.

What I got done

Over the week I edited chapters eleven through twenty, about ten chapters, each landing anywhere between two and a half thousand and six thousand words. The manuscript started the week over 100,000 words, and by the end I had a net loss of about 4,500 words once everything settled, even with new material going in.

That net figure hides the real work, though. A lot of what came out wasn’t story, it was mess: duplicate scenes, leftovers from earlier drafts that no longer belonged anywhere. Clearing that out is its own kind of progress, even when it doesn’t look like it on a word count graph. And I made it past the midpoint hurdle that stopped me cold in December, which was the whole point of the exercise.

The cut I was afraid of, and what it taught me

I expected letting go of those words to be the hard part, deciding that scenes I’d already written, that had taken real time, were simply going in the wrong direction and needed to go.

What actually surprised me came after the cut. Going back to fix the second half of one scene, I realised that some pieces of what I’d just removed were actually important. They were needed, just not where I’d originally put them. I only saw that clearly once I’d let the original version go and looked at what remained with fresh eyes. Trying to rescue the scene as it stood would have kept me stuck. Cutting it first was what let me see where the pieces actually belonged.

What still went sideways

The clearest example was a scene I’d planned to keep no matter what: a night at the bar where all the main characters are together, with one key interaction I knew needed to happen. I’d planned for it in advance. I still spent real time trying to shoehorn it into the draft as originally imagined, and it kept resisting.

It wasn’t until I took it out entirely that I could see where it actually fit. Even with a full weekend of prep behind me, some decisions I thought I’d already made turned out to be wrong once I tried to build them into the real draft. Planning ahead helped enormously, but it didn’t make me right about everything.

What this book is teaching me about process

This has been one of the harder books I’ve written, and it’s changed how I think about my own process. A few things I’m taking forward.

Not every book asks for the same approach. Sometimes you need to push through, sometimes you need to step back, and sometimes you need to go in the wrong direction before you can see the right one. I wrote a whole post on the ninety-minute focus structure that’s part of the retreat and has worked for me lately (don’t worry, you haven’t missed it yet, it’s still to come), and it’s worth knowing that this book is the one that demanded it. Thirty-minute sessions, which have served other projects well, simply don’t work for this one. It needs longer, uninterrupted stretches to find its rhythm.

The bigger lesson has been about character work. Early on, this draft had internal conflict and external conflict running in parallel without actually touching each other, two characters each having their own experience without those experiences colliding. The book only started working once I forced those threads to depend on each other.

The part of a writing retreat I can’t manufacture alone

There’s one more piece of this that matters as much as any structural fix: being in a room full of other people quietly getting on with their own work. There’s a particular kind of accountability that comes just from everyone around you being absorbed in their own project on the same rhythm of focus and breaks. And when the breaks come, that’s when the real conversations happen. Everyone talks through where their story or their research has got stuck, fiction and non-fiction writers alike, all trading the same kind of problem in different disguises.

I can’t fully recreate that at my desk at home. It’s a big part of why I keep going back to a proper writing retreat rather than trying to force the same result solo.

If you’re tempted to try a writing retreat yourself, I can wholeheartedly recommend Acorn Writing Retreats. A huge thank you to Rebecca, who runs them, for consistently putting together the kind of structure and community that makes weeks like this one possible.

Thanks for reading along, Featherling. 🪶

May your magic behave and your monsters stay quiet,

Jemma