Megan Crewe – another world, not quite ours

(or any other sort of retreat for that matter)

I know there are a lot of writers who’d like to attend a retreat, or attend more retreats, but find it hard to make it to or afford the bigger ones out there. That’s the position my critique group was in four years ago. We were sitting around talking about how nice those retreats sounded, and started speculating about whether we could set something up for ourselves, and I said, “Let me see what I can do.” A month later we had our very first private retreat!

So I figured some of you might be interested in knowing how I went about doing that. (I’ve handled most of the planning and organization for all four of our retreats.)

Note: All of this works best for a group of people who live within a couple hour’s drive of each other; if you’re trying to bring together people from further away, you’ll obviously need to make some adjustments in how you handle things like buying food.

And it’s usually best to start this process well ahead of time, especially if you’re going at a popular vacation time of year.

1. Determine how many people want to participate (and can at the time you all decide on). Discuss as a group any factors that will affect the details of the retreat, including:

-How long does everyone want to stay at the retreat for? (The first year we only did three nights, because we weren’t sure how it would go. Each of the last three years we’ve done five nights, and we’ve talked about maybe trying a whole week next year.) Note that as long as transportation is available for people, they may decide to come late or leave earlier than others if they can’t stay quite as long as the majority want to. (e.g., Last year all eight of our members were there for at least a couple nights, but only six of us stayed for the entire five.)

-What are everyone’s preferences for the location and features of accommodation? Total isolation or a place near/in a town or city where you can partake of civilization if you want to? How far are people willing to travel to get there? How much can everyone afford to chip in for the rent? Will everyone need a bed or are some okay with sleeping on a sofa or cot? How many bathrooms are an absolute necessity? If you’re going to a cottage, do you care about having a BBQ? A fire pit for roasting marshmallows? A lake to swim in?

-Is there anything people absolutely don’t want? (e.g., in the past we have avoided cottages with WiFi so no one will be tempted to procrastinate by surfing the ‘net. )

The number of people coming will also dictate how many beds you’ll need and how many parking spots.

2. Find potential places to stay that meet the criteria decided upon in the discussions above and are available for the dates you want. Since we like to stay in cottages, in Ontario, the two sites I always turn to are Cottages in Canada and CottageLink. There are plenty of similar sites for various types of accommodation in the US and elsewhere, too, I just can’t recommend any in particular. Usually it takes a little searching around to find ones that work best for you. Often I need to e-mail the owners to check details (for example, a lot of listings tell you how many bedrooms but not how many actual beds).

3. Share the best options with the rest of the group and narrow them down to the top two or three choices, then start booking. It’s best to know what your second favorite is in case you try the one you want the most and it turns out they just booked your dates. At this point you’ll want to start collecting everyone’s share of the rent, as most places ask for at least a small portion to hold the booking.

4. Come up with a plan for the retreat as a group. (This can also be done during the earlier discussion stage.) The plan can be as rigid as specific hours for meals and writing time or as flexible as leaving pretty much everything up in the air–though if you’re going somewhere not too close to any larger towns or cities you probably at least want to figure out the meal basics ahead of time. It really depends on what the participants want out of the group, and knowing what everyone’s goals are. My critique group mostly wants to get as much writing done as possible, so there’s an understanding that we’ll all go off on our own quietly most of the day and reconvene for meals and in the evening to relax and chat.

We’ve been lucky enough to have a member who enjoys cooking and has handled all the food purchasing (other than shared drinks and snacks) and cooking for the first three retreats. He wasn’t able to make it this year, though, and the system we used seemed to work quite well. We each brought food for all our individual breakfasts and lunches, other than a few common items we divvied up the purchase of, like milk and margarine, and to make one dinner for everyone. Each day everyone took care of their own breakfast and lunch preparation and clean-up, and then we took turns cooking dinner (and doing that clean up) for the group.

It’s good to get that worked out ahead of time so that everyone knows what their responsibilities will be and there’s no conflict over kitchen messes or the like.

You’ll also need to determine ahead of time how everyone will be getting to the retreat, based on who’s coming from where, who has a car, etc.

5. Go, and have fun! The easiest step, naturally. It’s often a good idea to exchange cell phone numbers ahead of time, unless you’re all going together, in case someone has trouble finding the place.

Those of you who’ve done retreats of your own, any other tips to contribute?

Before I sent my most recent book off to my trusty beta readers, I had a bunch of fact and detail-checking to do, things I hadn’t wanted to stop writing to look up or couldn’t look up once I was at the retreat. My rough drafts are always littered with square brackets around things like [last name] or [car type] to remind me to fill them in later. Some of the things I looked up for the current book:

-universities and community colleges in New York City
-different types of alcoholic drinks
-skiing locations near Boston
-how to release the safety on a pistol
-when the third Lord of the Rings movie came out
-the procedures that usually follow an arrest

Yet another reason I am so grateful to have the internet at my fingertips!

For the second time this month, I’m back! This time from my in-person critique group’s fourth annual writing retreat.

The five of us who were able to make it convened at a cottage just east of Parry Sound, which turned out to be even more ideal than it sounded online. All the trees made it totally private, there was a big living room and kitchen for us to hang out it, lots of big windows for excellent views, and three of the four bedrooms had a little balcony!

(The view from my balcony)

I very quickly set up a writing spot down by the lake, where the was a bunkie with a deck, and a handy electrical outlet on the outside wall! It also came with handy log seats to act as water bottle/notebook holder and foot rest:

One of the special features of this spot was that, because the cottage was on quite a high hill, I had to go down a whole lot of steps to get to it, which meant if I had any thoughts about heading back to the cottage for any sort of non-writing activity, I had this view to discourage me:

(About half the the stairs you’d have to climb up to get to the cottage)

Not that I ended up needing a great deal of encouragement to keep writing. This is the first time I was finishing a book at the retreat instead of starting one, and having all that plot and character development already in place created a lot of momentum. My goal was to finish the book by the end of the retreat, and I have returned victorious! I typed “The End” at 9:20pm on the last night we were there. I got down about 29,000 words in four days, bringing the total for the book to just over 73K.

I think it can be said that a most fun and productive time was had by all.

(All of us on the dock–sorry, this was the best lighting we could get!)

As promised, the final report on my trip to Nova Scotia!

There was a lot of driving in the last couple days, but on pretty quiet roads, so I didn’t mind. The best part was having Chris put on my THE WAY WE FALL playlist (aptly titled “plague book” ) during the long stretches. Hearing those some of those songs while driving through the landscapes my characters would have grown up in gave me the shivers, literally.

Our first stop was up on Digby Neck, where we went out on a whale-watching cruise. We got to see several humpback whales (including one that breached–leapt out of the water!) as well as dolphins, porpoises, and a brief glimpse of a seal. Hard to take pics of them, but here’s my best attempt with the whales:

Then we headed to the beautiful little town of Annapolis Royal, where I got to take a spooky and historical graveyard tour and we stayed in the oldest inn there, by far our favorite of the places we stayed, Hillsdale House:

Totally recommend it if you’re ever in the area.

Our last full day, we checked out some more cliffs, in the Blomidon Provincial Park. It’s on the Bay of Fundy, so the tides are very extreme–the water depth changing by a few dozen feet between low and high tide. We were at the beach close to low tide, and you can get some idea of how much of the sea floor was left bare:

And then it was time to come home. But I’m sure we’ll return some day!

Yesterday was quite a fun day, as we mostly just wandered around wherever looked interesting on our way down to our next stayover stop. The first place we came across was Ovens Natural Park, which focuses on the cliffs and ocean caves along the Atlantic coast. The waves crashing inside the caves make a distinctive booming sound, and there are all sorts of steps and walkways built into the side of the cliffs so you can peer (and sometimes even walk) inside. And it was useful for me to see, because a cliff plays an important role in THE WAY WE FALL.

A little further down the coast, we took a break at Rissers Beach:

The sun only came out for a little while, but long enough for me to get into the water for a bit. Can’t come to the ocean without going for a swim!

It was a good thing I did then, because today has been too overcast and occasionally rainy for either of us to feel like taking a dip. But we still went over to Cape Sable Island to see an actual Nova Scotia island community. And while we were there, I found a house that fit what I pictured for Kaelyn’s! (Though hers would be on a town street, with neighbors closer by.)

Tomorrow we’re setting off to catch a whale watching cruise. Wish us luck seeing a humpback whale or two!

Hurray! I have gotten this to work. (It’s been a little tricky because my laptop can’t handle certain WiFi networks, and I can’t edit photos on my iPad.)

Today we drove to Peggy’s Cove, one of the best known Nova Scotian locations. Mostly for this lighthouse, and the unique rocky landscape:

It is lovely, but at little overwhelmed with tourists. Only a few dozen people actually live in the village, and at least three times as many tourists there with us in the short period we were visiting. But it was really interesting seeing what a small fishing village on the coast looks like:

Then we zipped along to Lunenburg, which is full of gorgeous historic houses (the oldest was built in 1780). Here’s one of our favourites:

We enjoyed the varied color schemes many of the houses are painted in. This row gives a good example of what I mean:

Much brighter and more interesting than the plain old gray/brown/beige back home!

All this is giving me a much stronger sense of the town in THE WAY WE FALL. I’m still looking for a house that feels like Kaelyn’s house, though–the ones pictured above are too fancy, of course!

Off to Shelburne tomorrow–I’ll blog again later if the WiFi circumstances align.