Anne here, and I'm just back from my annual writing retreat. That's the view from my room, and the balcony where I did a lot of writing.
It's the thirteenth year we've done this, always with the same small group of around eight or nine, so we must be doing something right. (I say eight or nine because one of us now lives in France and can't come every year.) And for the last eight years we've come to the same place. With views like this, who could resist? As well as the gloriously ever-changing vista of sky and sea — and beach activity — I particularly love the sight of the high-rise buildings of the Gold Coast seeming to float in the distance, like the remnants of some lost dystopian city.
Now, of course, it's changed, with many more people here being published, and the close, if virtual, contact made possible by email, FaceBook and other methods. But face-to-face is still the best. And our retreat is very special to us all.
I've blogged about our retreat before on the Wenches, here and here, but this time I'm going to talk in a little more detail about some of the things we did. We're all working writers — that means we make our living from our writing. We're all multi-published, and two of us have written more than 100 category romances — each. We all started our careers writing for Harlequin, through a few of us have diversified. I'm the only one who writes historicals.
We've developed a routine that works for us. The morning is many people's best writing time, so we generally don't meet until lunchtime, though some people like a dawn walk along the beach and others take an early morning dip in the sea or the hotel pool.
At lunch time, we bring our lunch to the meeting room, and though it's social while we eat, we then do something for professional development. You might imagine that with more than 500 books between us, we wouldn't need any professional development, but in fact we do.
Publishing is a constantly changing business, and we need to a) keep up with new developments and b) keep our writing fresh. Often the topic for discussion is something we know quite well, and some of us have even conducted workshops on it, but having someone else present it, perhaps from a slightly different angle, and applying it to one's current wip (work in progress) can be quite inspiring.
We generally start talking about the topics we want to discuss well before the retreat, and on the first night, over fish and chips (or in this case pizza, because the fish shop we like had closed) and wine, we plan the program for the week.
Some sessions were conducted at lunchtime, and then we went back to writing (or shopping or swimming or reading.) At 6 (aka wine o'clock) we reconvened for nibbles, cheese, wine and chatting, followed by dinner, and after dinner there was another professional development session.
This year, these were our topics:
* The Snowflake Method of plotting
* Creating character empathy
* James Scott Bell's method of plotting from the middle.
* Using dictation to write (which a lot of writers are doing now, whether to increase their speed of production or because they're battling with injury.)
* Marketing — sharing techniques we use. Though actually not all of the group gets involved in marketing.
* One night we watched a video of a writer we all admire talking about his process.
* Another night we just sat back and watched a movie for no other reason except entertainment
* We had a session of playing with tropes — tropes being reader-favorite set ups, like a marriage of convenience, or Cinderella, or a road trip romance (where the hero and hero take a journey), the innocent and the rake, the pretend fiancée — that kind of thing. Our session involved twisting the trope or merging several tropes to come up with something fresh and different. I realized during that session that in my second book, Tallie's Knight I'd combined four tropes — Marriage of Convenience, Cinderella, Road Trip, and Secret Child — though I didn't know it at the time, being a newbie writer.
* We discussed a book that's been very successful, and half of us disliked it and didn't finish it and several of us enjoyed it and were amazed that the others didn't like it. That's usual with this group -- we have quite different tastes.
* We had a hands-on session on using Instagram.
* We had a workshop on the Pixar/Invisible Ink method of plotting, watched a few short PIXAR films on-line and used the format to create an outline of our current wips.
* And of course, given the huge growth in independant publishing (ie self-publishing) we talked about that.
Not all of the sessions "spoke to" everyone there, but we all got something out of them.
And all the time, from dawn to dusk, we watched the shifting magic of the sea and sky outside our windows. We watched storms come in over the sea, and brilliant blue sky and sea water turn sullent and brooding.
After one blustery blowy grey day we were treated to a glorious double rainbow, followed by a stunning sunset. We sat out on the balcony and drank wine and oohed and ahhed and took a heap of photos, none of which did credit to the actual glory of the sky. Above is the dawn sky, taken by an early morning person, and below is a sunset after a grey blustery day. Magic. I'm amazed we got any writing done at all.
PS: You might have heard that some of the wenches (Mary Jo, Andrea, Susanna and I) are appearing on a panel at the RWA conference in New York in July. The other exciting news is that seven wenches are getting together for a retreat afterwards. We're looking forward to it. Stay tuned. . .
So, what do you think of our program? Do any of these topics interest you? As a reader, do you have a favorite trope? Or a favorite PIXAR movie?