Update: The Writers' Retreat

Well, my road trip has carried me through a novel-writing retreat in Virginia, to a nursing home in Maryland where I sat with my elderly father-in-law, up the grey municipal highways through the urban snarls of the Northeast, and into the wooded hills of Connecticut, where the trees overhanging the narrow country roads were beginning to be tinged with the ochres of Autumn.  I’m now at the old family house in the town of Cornwall, where I’ll be spending the next month or so visiting with my brother.  It’s been an immense prodigal return from Zipolite to familiar scenes, with my yellow Miata at rest on the green grass of the driveway, and my laptop on the kitchen table where years ago my mother used to write. 

Yes, this in lieu of Tierra del Fuego.  As reasons for the switch I can separate out a financial, a familial, and a mercantile (I have some land for sale up here; need to check up on that), overlaid with a general refuge of indecision pending my Seattle apartment inhabited through November and newly purposed with creative ideas coming out of the writers’ retreat that would make a month’s pause welcome anywhere.  None of these excuse, in a travel sense, this alternate end of the road, and so the blog is likely to become more sporadic, hiding its head, as it were, as I immerse myself in personal affairs.  This may be the last post for a while.

But first, about that writers’ retreat.

I’d never been to a writers’ gathering of any kind before, so it was all new to me.  This one, the “Algonkian Writer Retreat and Novel Workshop,” advertised itself as a hardnosed clinic for battering your flawed manuscript into shape to meet the requirements of the market, sort of the Jack LaLanne approach to novel workshops, as opposed to those sentimental retreats based mostly on romantic settings.  Of course, it then offered a romantic setting: a line of rustic cabins along the banks of the Potomac in a wooded stretch of Algonkian Regional Park in Sterling, VA.  The mist rose over the river in the mornings, acorns fell onto the wooden porches by night, and every day I had to sweep leaves off my Miata to put the top down.  We each had a private room in the sturdy cabins, and met in the central cabin’s livingroom with wooden armchairs and firm sofas pulled into a circle.

The first surprise was that in the group of 13 writers I was the only male.  Apparently this ratio is standard in writer retreats; I’m not sure what that says about the industry, or me.  Many of the women—whose book ideas I got to know very well—were superb storytellers; all were creative, friendly people; it was a fun group with lots of laughter, and in general a pleasure for someone like me, who’s been writing in isolation, to be surrounded by fellow writers.  I can see why people go to these things.  The second surprise was that Jack LaLanne was nowhere to be found: organizer Michael Neff was softspoken, tactful, and encouraging, and while he did speak as the messenger of draconic entry requirements to the industry he did so in a thoroughly gentle and helpful way, perhaps schooled by the ratio of the frailer and no less litigious sex.

That said, he and his fellow faculty were unstinting in their market-based judgments.  In many cases the verdict on a story idea was unoriginality, and several writers were prompted to revise their books wholesale.  (Some tried to comply actually there, at the workshop, to my amazed admiration.)  In the process a picture emerged of a rabid, primary-color publishing world based on 30-second queries and immediate grab appeal, a carnival-barker atmosphere in which a given story set in Detroit might get through if the writer only “Set it in Bangladesh!”  As a newcomer to the game I could only measure the imposing battlefield with a sidelong look and keep my ears and spirit completely open.

The week went like this.  We spent the first few days polishing our “pitch,” the 200-word story summary with which to hook an agent, after which we had a chance to read them to an actual agent who visited.  From there we had each day a visiting expert who spoke to an aspect of the craft: story structure, characterization, dialogue, etc.  Some were better than others (it took one sweating fellow half an hour to set up his video component, finally saved by the children’s book writer) but all had something interesting for me to learn.  On the last day the workshop concluded with one-on-one sessions to discuss your book in detail.  Breakfasts and lunches were in the cabin; dinners were out in local restaurants, including, ironically, several outings to Mexican.

Organizer Michael Neff with Kim, Karen, and Denise, three of the attendees.

For me, I got some excellent feedback on my novel—including some plot holes pointed out that I must solve (at a Starbucks stop in Maryland I figured out how)—and more importantly a panoply of general advice that makes me impatient to go over every scene anew with a paintbucket of lessons learned in hand.  The visiting agent said I had a good pitch and story idea and she’d like to see my book.