by Jennifer Karchmer

I'm hot and cold about writer's retreats. This is pretty funny because I've been a professional writer for more than 25 years, so you'd think that I would jump at the chance to share a comfy couch with fellow scribes and commiserate about the craft.

​But my relationship to the weekend escape known as the retreat is more like a "Sam and Diane" connection (think TV show "Cheers") rather than a hand-in-glove love affair. I'm a writer in passion, talent and career, but I tend to resist the meta — the bird's-eye view of writing.   

This ambivalence is rooted in two precepts common to many writers — fear and procrastination. What if I find out that my writing sucks, that everyone else is better than me? Am I just stalling by getting away from it all, when what I really need is to get my butt in the chair? 

"A writer writes, right? How could attending a veritable break get more words on the page," I thought? 

Last fall, I decided to drop all of this psychological baggage to attend Write Doe Bay, a writer's mecca in Washington state that dubs itself, "an intimate artists' retreat and multi-workshop event..." Now that the dust has settled, I can say this three-day weekend (Oct. 6-8, 2017) gave me  ... 

Don’t tell my editor this: I've always had trouble meeting deadlines. The moments leading up to the finale crush me as I work frantically getting a piece done, sometimes kicking myself that I didn't dig deeper sooner.

What exactly do I resist? Avoid? Battle with? Struggle with?

So I ask myself: Is it fear of failure? Fear of performing? Fear of rejection?

When I write, I see the faces of my audience, as if I’m on stage. I’m ready to utter my lines, but my throat tightens with censorship. Will the performance be as good as the rehearsal?

I write the story in my head, but when I face the page, my mind is blank like a painter’s new canvas. Why does that prospect instill panic, rather than entice like an invitation?

As I sit at my desk toiling over my next draft,  judgment enters the room. She takes a seat, clipboard firmly clasped against her chest. She bites the end of a pen, her peering eyes above the bifocals ooze critique. She’s not front row and center shaking her head. Rather, I see her midway, maybe seven or eight rows back, just far enough to give the guise of objectivity, yet close enough that I can feel her heat.

These worries are cliché: a writer stalled, mind numb, paralyzed in the chair, what to write?

Enough of this, I say.

I’ve been resisting the muse for too long. I take an ice pick to my writer’s block; it’s time to chip away. I turn to my best friends on my bookshelf: King, Lamott, Goldberg and others who instruct and inspire. Strunk & White are in the corner (smoking a cig and sipping whisky).

The block begins to melt, just slightly. I pull a marked-up paperback off the shelf. On the cover, I see six thin pencils, standing at attention, serving as tree trunks to the web of ideas a writer calls upon when she grabs words from head and heart. The inside back cover is like a New York City subway car in the 80s: scribbled graffiti with lists, arrows, bullet points -- my notes from the first time I read the book.

​​It’s “The Forest for the Trees,” by Betsy Lerner, a long-time editor. She dubs it “Advice to Writers,” gently providing food for thought in the Track Changes of our writer minds. It’s one of my favorites, and today, I summon her counsel.

As I flip through the pages, I happily find several passages that I had circled, underlined or starred to remind me why I am a writer, why I struggle with my confidence and why I resist my muse.

From Lerner, I learn:

Ah! I recall the day I originally highlighted these poetic and prophetic paragraphs. As a collective, they lecture me like a professor: Your writing is like a piece of clay. You don't begin with the etchings of the tiny details and fine lines. You must build the foundation before it takes shape. So too with writing, one must put the thing up and lay it out. You cannot carve away (edit) pieces that could be saved for good use later.

Early in “Trees,” Lerner tells a story of the time when she got to study with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham. One day during a private conference, Graham had played a trick on Lerner – one that set in motion a detective's work of discovery.

​To be instructive, Graham had reassembled a series of the student's poems in such a way that transformed Lerner's approach to writing. The poems had gone from “acorns" to "an oak,” Lerner recalls.

With renewed creativity and a permission slip to experiment, Lerner rushed home and sifted through her poems to create new masterpieces, which eventually got published in prestigious literary journals.

“If you are struggling with what you should be writing, look at your scraps,” she says.

Back at my desk, I sit down and pull the paper snowballs out of the trash. I dust off an unfinished essay that was demoted to the lower drawer I rarely open. 

I hear Lerner's advice continue: “Whatever you do, I beg you not to look at the bestseller lists.”

Don’t try to copy what already exists, she says. Look at your scraps; therein lies your pot of gold.
​
Now, resist the voices that sit on your shoulder. Judgment does not have to be front and center; relegate her to the back row, I tell myself.

A version of this article was originally published in Red Wheelbarrow Writers.

This is an excerpt from Jennifer’s upcoming book,“Take (Your) Time To Write: The Path to Peaceful Writing,” based on the concept of slow writing. 

I’ve always been a slow writer. In the 1990s, at my first job as a reporter, I would take hours to finish a 500-word column that should have taken an hour or two after sifting through my notes. I would return from a school board meeting or a run-of-the-mill press conference and toil over the lede (first sentence of a news story) and every sentence. I would rewrite and rewrite until everything was just right. Of course, accuracy is critical in journalism, so I checked, rechecked, and made my quotes perfect. Still, my editor pulled me aside one day, and while assuring me I was doing a good job, she said I needed to produce more quickly. They were paying me by the hour ($5) and wouldn’t be able to afford me if I kept up this tortoise pace.

​Thankfully, I learned to speed it up. After putting in more than a decade in busy newsrooms, I can say I have never been fired for missing a deadline. (Admittedly, as I work on this post, I see out of the corner of my eye on the TV, three episodes of Seinfeld have passed in addition to at least half of “Dirty Dancing” so we’re moving in on three hours and I’m only halfway finished.)

Several years ago, I made the transition from a “Just the facts, ma’am” reporter to a personal essay freelance writer. Today, I make my own deadlines – a dream come true for a writer, but with the autonomy comes discipline. So I’ve turned to other writers for guidance.

Frightfully, at a cocktail party, I overhear one writer say she jumps out of bed at the crack of dawn to get her butt in the chair before the family begins to stir. Similarly startling was the time a fellow scribe tell me he neurotically crosses off “Wrote 1,500 words!” on his daily To Do list. Getting up before the roosters? Hitting a daily self-imposed word count? ​Is this discipline or competition?

Realizing these conventions are not for me, I try to build my confidence, and my writing practice, around a slower, more relaxed pace that seems more in tune with my molasses gait. I admire you early risers, I really do. But it’s just not my style, so why force it? Writing is not only a career but an art, a passion–one that inches along to the tune of the muse whom I invoke when the sun and moon align.

Well, it’s actually not that magical but I put a lot of stock in how I am feeling. I am a productive writer, but these laments make me feel stressed out and depleted. Am I really a writer if I don’t adhere to these routines? I had left the busy newsroom grind and didn’t want to replace it with tortuous rules that seemed to leave me with a wet blanket of guilt draped over my shoulders.​