Writing fellowships and retreats: Some thoughts and tips.
We all know the Virginia Woolf line: ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’
A writing fellowship, retreat or residency is essentially a period of time and space for a writer to focus on their work, uninterrupted by domestic or ‘real’ life. It’s the classic image many of us have of writers – sequestered away in a cabin in the woods, or a shack in the bush, pounding away at the keys.
In some ways it’s that simple; in others it is much more complex. It works for a reason, but it’s also by nature an experience that is inaccessible to many writers. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and having just done my first fellowship earlier this month at Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in Western Australia, I wanted to share my thoughts and tips.
For years I had heard other authors talk about retreats and residencies and what they were able to achieve in that environment. But when my turn came, I was worried I’d buckle under the pressure and end up procrastinating away the opportunity. (Have you met me? I am a gold medal procrastinator).
The best advice I got came late one night at a bar after a friend’s book launch. I shall protect the anonymity of all parties, but this successful author told me they won a residency and spent the entire time (a week or two) reading and sleeping. They had zero regrets. Rest, inspiration and reading are all important and legitimate parts of the process of creativity. And with that permission, that gleeful nose-thumbing at my worst case scenario, I felt like I had permission to do as much or as little as I was able to do. It felt very freeing.
My experience
I was lucky to win a one-week Flash Fellowship at KSP Writers Centre in March 2024. They provided a self-contained cabin at a big discount, and I just had to get myself to Perth and make the most of it. Being able to leave my day job and young family for a week to focus purely on writing was such a gift. I’d been in a prolonged period of low-confidence in my writing and instincts. The fellowship was the hard reset I needed, to sink into a single project and the joy of the process of writing and creating, to drown out the background noise of sales and contracts and social media and listen only to the birds. I shared on Instagram about what an ideal day was like:
Arriving for the fellowship, I had 60,000 words drafted in early 2023 that I had put aside for many months. For two days I read and annotated the printed manuscript, summarising each scene on a post-it. Then I visually moved around scenes using a whiteboard to form a cohesive narrative structure. Finally I started a fresh draft in Scrivener to replicate the new structure. At that point I had a 57,000 word manuscript. Then I worked on strengthening characters and their arcs, and rewrote the opening chapters as well as some entirely new scenes. I left KSP with a 63,000 word manuscript: I had written more than 6000 words of new material. Not the 20,000 words one of the other fellows wrote over two weeks, but more than I had written in a week in a long time. You gotta run your own race!
A lot of the new clarity I found with this project came from distance. I hadn’t looked at the story for months, and I was now removed enough to cut and change with abandon. It also made me realise that I’d learned a lot in the past year, through editing Love Match, discussions with writing groups and absorbing craft books and podcasts. I was able to see the issues with the opening of my story in a way I couldn’t nine months earlier, and I knew how to fix them.
Unbroken time to focus on this single project let me hold it in my head in its entirety, enabling me to make new connections between characters and plot threads. Joy in rediscovering what I loved about this project became joy in the process of writing generally, which I’d been missing for months. And simply being chosen for this program gave me confidence I was sorely lacking. It was the encouragement I needed and I’ll forever be grateful for that.
It was also a great opportunity to travel to Western Australia and connect with the writing and reading community there. I was able to organise an author event at Open Book in Perth, to visit Perth bookstores and connect with local writers, as well as the other two fellows at KSPWC at the time, Katharine and Terena. We met up for a drink or a chat most evenings and it was actually very encouraging to know that there were other people nearby focusing madly on writing!
Why it works
Being alone, and being focused on one thing for an extended period, brings a depth of concentration that can be hard to recreate in everyday life.
When you’re used to parenting a small child, time alone is revelatory. In my regular life I’m privileged in having access to childcare and being able to afford to allocate hours to write each week. But I was shocked how much more productive I was when I could roll straight out of bed and write each morning, without listening out for little feet running down the hallway or breaking focus for the trip to daycare.
Time alone let me not just immerse myself, but submerge myself into a story I’d grown distant from. I was talking about this with Karina May, about how getting into a story is like deepsea diving. It takes time to sink down to the depths where creativity happens, but the longer you can spend down there, the more the discordant ideas of a story start to connect and flow together. A week of solitary focus allows you that rare ability to hold the whole book in your head, something I’ve only experienced before deep in edits before a deadline, and it came at the expense of sleep. That deep work is all-consuming and exhausting, and resurfacing again takes time too. Sometimes I felt like I’d forgotten how to talk to other humans by the afternoon drinks!
A note on accessibility
Figuring out how to manage care of my young daughter while I spent a week on the fellowship was the biggest challenge of the experience. We don’t have family nearby and my husband works an early shift, leaving for work hours before daycare opens. We considered flying in one of our parents, or hiring a nanny to cover the mornings, but both were prohibitively expensive. Once again the solution was for my husband to take time out from his work to be the primary carer so that I could take the opportunity.
I’m lucky to have a partner willing to do that, but it makes me wince to think of how much art we miss out on from women/parents who don’t have the same support (without even getting into the economic privilege required). Fellowships and residencies are by nature very difficult to do when you have small children, and it has always felt like a missed opportunity to me that there’s not some equivalent retreat/facility with childcare included. Let me know if you know any billionaire philanthropists I can talk to about this!
Taking a fellowship is a big privilege. Michelle Scott Tucker articulated some of my concerns in her piece for Meanjin in February 2020 ‘Writers’ Residencies: Pros and Cons’. Of course there are many other aspects of the accessibility of these opportunities:
“Very few residencies cover the cost of getting from home to the venue and back again. A residency at a prestigious overseas or interstate venue is going to look great on your literary CV, but only if you can afford to get there. And only if you can continue to afford to continue to pay the rent, or mortgage, while you are away.
“Getting there—and sometimes even staying there—can also be difficult for writers living with a disability or illness. For these writers, says author Anna Spargo Ryan, ‘accessibility sometimes means allowing disabled people to create in their existing optimised spaces’. Staying there can be difficult for other writers too. Not everyone is comfortable living alone for the duration.”
I recommend reading the whole article, which has some great suggestions for what kinds of support might work better for more writers.
Want to try it yourself?
To apply for fellowships or residencies (where you win a place and your accommodation is subsidised), you’ll likely need to submit a sample of your work in progress, and a plan for what work you’d like to get done, as well as your bio and some information about you. These spots are limited and coveted, so follow the application guidelines to the letter and make sure what you submit is polished. If you can afford to, you can also ‘pay and stay’ at many of the places that offer residencies.
Sign up to newsletters from your local writers centre to hear about opportunities. The main ones are Varuna (in the Blue Mountains) and KSP Writers Centre (in the Perth hills). ArtsHub tracks opportunities as well, for other disciplines as well as writing.
You can also take matters into your own hands and book a house-sit or holiday house, alone or with other writers, for a weekend, a week, or two. I know many authors make this part of their process on each book (if you’re following Kate Mildenhall or Anna Downes or Ashley Kalagian Blunt on instagram you’ll see they all do this).
A residency or retreat could be wonderful for you and your writing. But don’t let not having one be a barrier to backing yourself. There are ways to recreate the conditions in smaller, more accessible ways. I can recommend a one-night sleepover at a writer friend’s house. Maybe you can manage a hotel room for a night. A long train ride, or half a day at a new-to-you library or hotel bar might give you that new workspace buzz.
The main things you want to recreate are: a fresh environment, solitude (or the company of another focused writer), a bit of nature if possible, and being able to pause/ignore responsibilities and other work for a period of time, however much you can carve out. Good luck!
My top ten tips
- Be gentle with yourself. If you spent the whole time reading, napping or watching movies, would that be the end of the world? Maybe you need to do that for a day or two and then you’ll find a new hunger to write.
- Make the most of the setting and experiment with your routine. For me what I found worked best was starting the day handwriting morning pages outside; coffee-fuelled writing sprints while my mind was fresh in the morning; fitting in some exercise or movement; hiding my phone away; watching an old rom-com after dinner; and being prepared for late night bursts of imagination.
- Connect with other writers there. If you’ve ever been on a school camp you’ll know the alchemy that sometimes comes when you click with someone new. You’ll never know if you don’t try debriefing over evening drinks, trips into the city, or laps and reading at the local pool.
- Know your fuel. Bring the tea you love, and be prepared for your coffee situation. I had ground coffee from my favourite local cafe and my days were structured around pots of french press.
- Be creative about ways to move your body. A quick youtube yoga stretch can be just what you need to take a break from the screen and come back focused. Pack your swimmers and goggles – every town has a pool and swimming is such a good body and brain reset! Plus you can get a popsicle on the way out.
- Engage with the local community. This could mean bookstore visits, organising an author event, sightseeing, getting out in nature, doing the local Parkrun, or meeting up IRL with a local writer you know from Instagram.
- Fizzy mineral water in the afternoon. Get yourself a big bottle for each day. The perfect pick-me-up.
- Make it easy on yourself with food. You’re not going to cook yourself dinner every night, so don’t order groceries like you’re at home with your family! Nourishing, fresh meals you can assemble are best – cereal or yoghurt with lots of fresh fruit; toast with hummus and sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, sprouts. And of course lots of snacks – I had popcorn with a movie most nights, and got through an obscene amount of chocolate and nuts. Basically you want to minimise having to think about feeding yourself.
- Document your experience. Plan time to take some pictures or video and post to social media. It’s perfectly legitimate to take time off from posting but you’ll want to have some photos and maybe video so you can share about the experience and thank the place you stayed. And of course don’t forget to sign the guest book, and see who else sat at that desk before you!
- Be prepared for magic. Maybe it’s being far from home, maybe it’s having mornings to yourself for the first time in years, maybe it’s being able to watch birdlife out the window, but you might find your brain doing things you don’t recognise. Be gentle in your expectations but open to being taken by surprise, by your story or your characters or yourself.
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Clare Fletcher 