Six writers, one cabin, and a lot of weird
Sweet cottage
that spooked at least three of us!
It’s early. Someone is already up, the furious tap of keys on a keyboard tells me whoever the hell it is, is reading over a sentence that won’t quite behave, desperately wrangling words while the rest of the world sleeps.
There are six of us tucked away in a cabin in regional Victoria. One of our crew couldn’t make it, so we video call her in like a séance participant. Can you hear us? Tap once for yes.
When we booked the place, we had a list of requirements: a bedroom each (non-negotiable), no bunks (we’re too old for that shit), and ideally a desk in every room. We know this isn’t always realistic, so we adapt. Writing slumped in bean bags, sitting at kitchen tables, laptops on laps while we stretch out in bed, notebooks sprawled on floorboards, and thinking about our stories while an electric massager pummels out the shoulder knots. Writers will contort themselves physically if it means they can get words on a screen/page. We’re like yoga instructors, except our core strength is chocolate (and in my case, wine and swearing).
The cabin itself is unsettling. There’s an old-fashioned phone with a face that looks like it only rings for bad news, some freak-me-out art featuring a tortured woman with vacant eyes, and a sauna tucked in the back laundry like it’s hiding a body. If I let my mind wander, I’m sure there are ghosts of murdered women and children floating about. A fitting audience, really.
We all arrive with the same goals—to write, edit, or at least create something even if it’s just mental space to think. My personal aim is to work furiously without interruption. No child yelling about lost socks, no guilt dragging me toward the washing machine. Just me, my laptop, and a looming deadline.
Everyone’s retreat looks different. Some of us write like the house is on fire. Some walk the grounds, muttering plot lines to kangaroos. There are naps under the guise of creative rest and many tea and chocolate breaks. If I had my way, I might pour a wine at 3pm declaring it character research, but with the majority of our group not drinking for health reasons or Octsober commitments, I don’t want people to think I’m an alco. I’ve never tried the ‘write drunk, edit sober’ theory, but there’s always next time.
Writers are strange creatures. We voluntarily isolate ourselves to invent problems for imaginary people, then get emotionally wrecked when those fake people suffer. We see metaphors in traffic lights, squirrel away dialogue we overheard at Bunnings, and analyse a packet of chips looking for moral truths. We sweat over commas and feel personally victimised by Microsoft Word’s grammar suggestions.
At dinner, we talk about our characters as if they’re real and almost injure ourselves trying to sum up our stories in three sentences that might hook a publisher. Nobody finds this odd. We are, after all, a species powered by Burger Rings (on this trip anyway), imposter syndrome, and the unshakable belief that rearranging 80,000 words might fix something in ourselves, or maybe even society.
There’s something about being among real, flesh-and-blood writers that quiets the inner noise. The self-doubt that usually trills in our ear (Is this any good? Why am I doing this again?) gets drowned out by the reassurance of shared obsession. We’re all here because we can’t not write. That’s the unspoken contract.
Retreats and writers’ groups aren’t glamorous. No one’s handing out publishing deals with morning tea. We lament the shortcomings of an industry with vast inequities, grumble about advances that barely cover the electricity bill, laugh about reviews that clearly missed the point. Yet there’s still beauty in sitting around a table with people who understand what it means to rearrange a sentence twelve times just to get the breath right. People who know how lonely this work can be, how intoxicating, and also how ridiculous. It’s realising that writing, for all its solitude, is built on connection: between writer and reader, between one draft and the next, between the voice inside your head and the ones sitting beside you, nodding.
When I come home from these retreats, I usually bring back something I can’t manage in the noise of everyday life: the whole manuscript in my head. This trip was only two nights, with one full day of writing, but I edited my fourth manuscript, which mostly involved remembering what I’d cut, what I’d added, and where to drop a clue on page 34 that will matter on page 344. That kind of mental gymnastics is impossible at home when half your brain is occupied with authorising school forms and remembering to clean up cat spew.
Mostly, though, a retreat is proof that writers are both deeply strange and deeply human. We believe in words enough to chase them into the woods and lock ourselves away with other eccentrics until they start to make sense again.
Writers are weird, yes, which is why it’s important to find each other. Otherwise, we’d just be muttering to ourselves alone in suburbia, and that’s harder to explain to the neighbours.
What do you find weird about writers / the pursuit of writing? Join the conversation.
Kylie
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