I’ve just finished my annual, in-home, writing retreat, and highly recommend the experience to all writers! While writing does happen, much else occurs that is very important to my creative process. Here are a few insights from this year’s retreat:
- It takes time to shift gears from having a whole family around, with its noise and belongings, to being solo, with its vast silence and spaciousness (no size 12 shoes scattered about, for instance). On the first night of retreat, I stack up a few movies I’ve jotted down during the year, and enjoy a nice meal in front of the a-musement (literally, non-thinking). I always hope to find a great story, a belly laugh, a movie I’ll enjoy discussing later, but, sadly, usually wind up flipping through them in disappointment. Sigh. It’s always worth a try, and it discharges all the interior ‘noise’.
- There are still animals to care for, meals to prepare, dishes to wash, and even a bit of laundry to deal with. These are constant reminders that my creativity is not detached from reality, in a separate, spacey, sphere of light and ideas, but is (and must stay) grounded in the realities of my life. I appreciate the earthiness and physicality of such things, and I think they give my work gravitas. At least, they give me a tremendous sense of solidity and rootedness as a person. (NB: Whatever you are paying for fresh goat milk is not enough!)
- I place all my files out all over the house. It becomes a physical representation of my mind – one I can walk through, move materials around in, and de-clutter. All during the year, scraps of thought get shoved into those files so as not to be lost, though I have no time to develop them. Each year, when I pull them out, I have real work to do sorting and spending more time with each little ‘seed’ ideas. For me, such physical representations of my own thoughts are very important. During the year, I sometimes do ‘mind maps’ to identify connections between writing projects, non-writing projects, and the direction God gives in various ways.
- I’m in various places with different writing projects. One needs its bones worked on – the interior, organizing structure is not clear, though I’ve accumulated lots of material to include. Another needs deeply contemplative, poetic time to be reconstituted within my being and worked on there. This one just needs to be typed, that one is ripe to be written quickly. I’ve found it’s a good thing to have lots of things going on at once, so that at any given time I can connect the mood I’m in, or the kind of time I have available with some project’s progress.
- This year, I realized how much I wanted to be done with all the projects ‘on deck’ just now. I wanted those files neatly combined into books, poems, posts, articles, and then gone – clearing space for next things. God helped me accept the fact that, like all those physical chores that give me gravitas, the tremendous collection of thoughts, quotes, notes, ideas, and diagrams will remain. It has become the ‘ground’ where many seeds are growing, and I simply won’t get it tidied up and move on. In that ground, the roots of things are, in fact, so jumbled they cannot now be sorted apart. In the files for one project are materials for many more, and there is no clear priority for one that needs to be finished first so the others can live. They seem to grow on their own, and to be being written in my life whether I work on them, or not. I have said many times that the Catholic artist must learn what it means to be an artist in community – in the Body of Christ – and during this retreat realized a bit better myself. My best work is that which has been called forth from me by the Body – friends need advice; people need spiritual counsel; someone needs a speaker; a mom needs help working on home-life or home-schooling; someone responds to a post and shows me what more is needed; an editor needs an article on a particular topic. The greatest helps are questions and responses that show what, in them, resonated to the ‘sound’ of my message. I wonder if the Body realizes its role in developing the artists in its midst??
So, there’s a few tidbits from my last two weeks. What’s happening in your world?
What a great way to move forward: stop, look and listen! And clean up, as needed, of course. I am curious about how you are able to take this retreat. I mean, how are you able to plan having an empty household to be used by just you? That probably wouldn’t work here. However, your post did give me an idea that there’s no reason I couldn’t do something similar away from the house, alone. Of course, I don’t think I’d bring all my files…..
For some, being at home would be harder, as you might be confronted with so many other to-dos…I try to get as much of that kind of distraction cleared away as possible…don’t know how I could do it without all my project files, though! A huge part of the process is seeing the ‘growth’ during the year of seedlings in some of those files…but however you do it, I hope you get an annual re-charge retreat!!
Janet, what a delightful reply! And great advice, too. The Body of Christ dimension really ratchets up this whole thing, as I think most people in the Church (and, sadly, many artists as well) still buy into the idea of the artist as a sort of lone genius, or space-case doing unnecessary ‘creative stuff’ just because they love it. They don’t get that we need to serve the Body, and also to be helped to develop within the Body, which means give and take, dialogue, appreciation, opportunities to share our gifts without being made to feel we’re showing off…all that, and more!
It’s funny but I just gave the same advice to a non-Catholic writer, except I did not refer to the Body of Christ. He is the son of a man I’m going through my cardiac rehab with, who wants to be a writer, is living at home, and has become something of a recluse, which he associates with a life of writing. His dad asked if I would give him some advice.
What I told him was, all your characters are actually you, so you’d better live life to the fullest and gather every bit of experience you can so that you can draw upon it when your character and your plot needs the detail. In other words, get out of the house and get to living! I believe before we finished I’d convinced him to call that girl he’s been admiring and get to the task of marriage and fatherhood–so that he can write about it.
And you can’t be a recluse not only for the sake of your fiction. You can pick up a good bit of change stringing to a local paper, just from interesting events you run into ‘on the road.’ I told him I had just seen one, passing a sign about a ‘reunion’ at the local Bohemian cemetery. Now for one thing, that cemetery is just brimming with photo ops, Gothic statuary and exotic landscaping and ancient graves. For another, consider who you might meet at such a reunion! I am certain the Chicago Tribune would buy a piece on the event from a free-lancer (a ‘stringer’), because having worked on a newspaper I know from experience, their reporters don’t know about it because, just like most folks, they do not so often move from their air-conditioned desks to find out.
You can’t be a recluse to be a paid writer, so maybe let me add that to your great list in this post–you can’t worry about being too neat with all those ideas floating around your desk, and often you get your best professional support from interacting with others in charity, in our case often the real Body of Christ.
I did, by the way, pitch for the Faith before we hung up, because believing is caring, and caring sharpens all your tools, your intellect, your imagination, even your vocabulary!
His dad was inordinately grateful for the call, which he counted as therapy. And isn’t writing often that, as well!