retreat Archives - Melanie Bell

I’m back from my songwriting retreat in the Peak District, where I spent a week in a converted barn in the countryside with a group of musicians and our facilitator, Murray Webster, who arranged daily activities and masterminded the whole thing.

There was a lot of talent in that one living space! Guitar chords rang out, piano melodies took shape, and voices harmonized. We had an eclectic mix of genres, instruments, and areas of expertise as well as experience levels.

Each morning, we were given a brief to work on for the day, with a short introduction to the theory behind it. These mostly took collaborative forms. One day, each of us wrote a title, lyrics to someone else’s title, and music for someone else’s lyrics. Another day, we worked in trios to create a minor key tune.

We performed our pieces in the late afternoon and had songshares in the evenings, going around the circle and performing songs we’d written. We cooked and cleaned together, took country walks, nighttime walks to a pond full of toads, and outings to nearby villages.

The saddest part of the retreat was when one participant had to leave on the first day due to a pet’s death. She was a harpist and had brought a stunning instrument with her, only to pack it up and drive back to Glasgow in her malfunctioning truck.

While not perfect, on the whole, the group was surprisingly harmonious – kind of like our tunes. It helped that we all wanted to be there.

I wrote a lot and got some useful pointers on my rudimentary guitar playing. I also decided to let go of a project I’d been certain I would do for the past few years. At least in the iteration I had in mind, it was no longer the right thing at the right time.

I’m now collaborating on some songs with one of the other participants. And I found a second-hand alto saxophone in a local shop, a beautiful instrument with a black body and flower design. It’s an instrument I used to play but had never owned. Stay tuned – it may show up on a track at some point!

In other news, the draft recording of my short radio drama is done, featuring original music and an eclectic mix of accents, and one of my short stories was accepted for an illustrated folklore anthology coming out in the autumn. I can’t wait to share both of these with you!

If you love to write and have the privilege of being able to travel, you might dream of doing both things in tandem. Maybe you’ve heard stories of digital nomads who hop from country to country and make a living from their laptops, or writers who travel in their camper vans. If that’s not a lifestyle you’re looking to commit to (at this point, anyway), here are 5 shorter-term ideas for combining the work of writing with the life experience of travel.

1. Write while in transit

J. K. Rowling famously got the idea for the first Harry Potter book while on a train. If you can write on a bus, train, subway, or plane without getting motion sick, those are great excellent places to do it. Time that might otherwise be spent watching Netflix or just sitting there can be surprisingly productive, with the motion bringing your mind into “the zone”. If you’re too sensitive to motion to look down at your paper or laptop, these forms of transport are still great places to people watch. Look around you and imagine the life stories of your fellow passengers. Ask yourself how they’d react if a wild situation were to suddenly occur. Amtrak recognized the unique inspiration-generating quality of time spent in motion when it offered train-based writing fellowships (a program that, sadly, no longer exists). Walking, a shorter and self-propelled form of transit, is also great for generating ideas.

2. Keep a travel journal

Many writers keep notebooks for their ideas. While traveling, if you want to capture stories from the road, bring a journal and try keeping track of what happens each day. Given the unpredictability that often accompanies travel, you never know when or how inspiration might strike. It might not be immediate, either. If you hold on to your travel journals, they might become sources for ideas in hindsight. Cheryl Strayed kept a journal of her time on the Pacific Coast Trail and came back to it 17 years later, reshaping the material into her beloved memoir Wild.

3. Go on a writer’s retreat

There’s a reason for the popularity of writers’ retreats. Sometimes nothing gets the creative juices flowing like the fresh perspective provided by a new setting, with time and space away from your daily life. Getting out of your routine is one of the gifts of a writing retreat, and often the locales are inspiring in themselves. There are writing retreats for many different budgets and goals, from solitary cabins to vacation-like experiences that bring people together and incorporate exciting local activities.

4. Write about places you visit

Lots of good writing is born from journeying: the whole genres of travel writing and travel journalism, memoirs, poetry, and the list goes on. Writing about the places you visit is a great way to get involved and get to know people there, as I discovered while in the Northwest Territories where I made wonderful connections by writing about fashion shows and arts festivals for local newspapers and magazines. Visiting places can spark ideas for pitches to travel websites or magazines. If you write professionally, in many countries you can claim related travel costs as professional expenses for tax purposes. Some locales offer travel grants for writing and researching place-based projects. If you’re lucky, you might even break into travel writing that will send you somewhere to report from on the ground.

5. Use the setting to fuel your imagination

Sometimes writers write about the places they visit, and sometimes they use travel to invent new places. If you’re writing speculative fiction, travel and worldbuilding can go hand in hand, as imaginary places are typically grounded in real ones. Would the Stillness of N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy exist, or be as convincing, without the author’s research trip to visit volcanoes in Hawai’i? Ellen Goodlett, author of the YA fantasy Rule, spent a year traveling the world with the Remote Year program while completing her novel. One of her interviews details how bits and pieces the places she visited showed up in her book’s imaginary kingdom.

Do you dream of writing and traveling? What ways have you thought of to combine the two?

Melanie Bell

Author, Writer, Editor

Tag Archives: retreat

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