Well, here we are again. Since my last retreat update, the Urban Writers Retreats have turned 3 years old! I can’t honestly say it’s been easy;  many times I’ve thought that if my aim was to create something cool and make a little money, I might have been better off getting a bar job and taking up painting.  Sometimes I end up spending all of my time working on the retreats rather than writing, which rather defeats the object.

But, aside from the fact that I’m terrible at painting, seeing how happy it makes people to walk away with another chunk of novel done and hearing that ‘oh, what a great idea’ from writers, knowing I’m able to provide the sort of space people long for, tells me this is a good idea and that I should persevere. And, of course, I’m one of you. I’m one of the people who wants to write but who sometimes finds it hard to make room for the writing I really want to do (and am therefore a little scared of). I know this benefits writers because it benefits me.

And so my little retreats, after starting inauspiciously in a room with a half-dead mouse in the corner (a story for another time perhaps), have made it through 3 years. And this year I’ve rediscovered them. I’ve started doing things my way, with afternoon tea and wordcount horseraces. I ran an online bootcamp earlier in the year, and while it’s fair to say I’m still working out how to do those things with a better approach and not end up feeling like a schoolteacher, I have gained huge faith in the power of groups and accountability and am planning more things for next year.

Speaking of which, here’s the horserace. Mine is the rubbish one at the back because I was doing a lot of sorting and planning that day, but check out the Ostrich way over on the right! It feels as though a 5k wordcount challenge is a good thing to give people to aim for, and you can see a few grouped in that area. I just add the picture/race element because it’s funny. Not everyone thinks so, but that’s ok. Enough people join in for it to be cute and amusing.

And as for cake, oh, we had cake. The Bake-O-Matic went a bit retro and votes were pretty evenly split. So I went for a Victoria sponge cake and chocolate brownie bites. Then Elaine, a first-timer, bought us her pumpkin and raisin loaf, which was completely lovely and made me all warm and fuzzy. Oh, and they aren’t on this pic but I’d had a fit of enthusiasm and made mince pies. I know it’s a bit early, but I don’t do a retreat in December and I was determined to get past my terrible-pastry issues (since you ask, it was a bit meh on this batch but I’ve got it sorted since).

I also wanted to show you the gorgeous green wall that’s been growing outside The Cube for the last 6 months or so. This autumn has been so mild that it’s survived really well and I’m interested to see what it’s like when we come back in January.

So. That’s it. Another year over, for the physical retreats at least. But I do have exciting plans up my sleeve, including online writing retreats!

Like, srsly.

More on that to come.

How would you feel if you wrote 25,000 words in a month?

Is that your normal routine or does it seem a long way off? For me, it feels like quite a stretch. It’s only 1,000 words a day, and even gives you a few days off, but have I been doing it regularly? No. Life just gets in the way.

My poor notebook feels very unloved.

In April I took part in the Screw Work Lets Play 30 Day Challenge. You pick your own challenge which, crucially, must be something you find FUN, and work alongside 200 other people to produce something tangible in a month. Being told to have fun – I can get on board with that.

I built a website from scratch when this challenge happened in April, one I’d been wanting to make for ages but had put off because I didn’t know quite how to do it and was a bit scared of how it would turn out. It was the combination of the overall ‘we can do this!’ feeling alongside weekly accountability check-ins with a small group to hold myself that I really liked. And having something solid to show at the end of a month is such a brilliant feeling that I can’t wait to do it again in October. This time I’m going to write 25,000 words of a novel, and will be hanging out in the writing group on the forum.

True, I could just sit myself down and do it without joining the challenge. But honestly, would I? Experience tells me that the answer is no, that I’d have the best of intentions but get nothing done. Yet another month would race past before I’d even set aside time for writing. And I want to do this enough to find ways of making it happen.

So why this instead of NaNoWriMo? Both are great, actually. The reasons that I’m doing this instead this year are that: A) I had a great time doing SWLP in April and have seen the results, and B) both times I’ve done NaNo I’ve hated what I wrote. It’s fantastic for making people just sit down and write, but the ability to pick your own target (whether that’s wordcount, chapters, or something else) on SWLP means you can plan and use it to develop as a writer rather than just panicking and throwing anything on the page.

Because it’s a couple of weeks away still there’s time to prepare properly. Following my own advice, I’m going to release my inner geek and write something I really want to, not what I think other people will think is ‘good’. I’ll try to remember to share my planning progress on the Facebook page, but roughly speaking I’m going to spend next week brainstorming and looking back through old work, the week after choosing one idea and sketching a very rough story-arc outline, and then fill in the gaps to create a plan. Exciting!

Full price will be around £200 but you can you can get it for £147 by signing up before 19th September (that’s this coming Monday!). The website has plenty more information about how it all works and results other people have seen so take a look around and sign up here.

I’ll see you in the writers forum. Challenge me up!

For a long time this blog just held ‘useful stuff’, resources and tools. Then I found the first Urban Writers blog and remembered that I really enjoyed sharing something a bit more personal, so thought I’d post a couple of photos from yesterday’s retreat.

I haven’t really taken any of people working or our breaks because some people might not want their pictures up, but it was such a beautiful day that we had both lunch and afternoon tea outside. We were completely full and it was a lovely bunch, almost all people I’ve not met before.

This is what my 5-year old nephew helped me to make on Saturday (scones and badly-lit lemon drizzle cake):

I thought it was time to add a bit more fun to the retreats, so we had a wordcount horserace. The name seems to fox people, but actually it’s kind of self-explanatory. You take a horse (or a giraffe or a monkey) and move it along the racecourse, which is marked with wordcount milestones, as you write more. It’s more to do with being part of a game and challenging yourself than about being competitive with others, and I particularly like the horse that’s going backwards:

Yes, it’s daft, I know. But it’s cute so it’s staying.

Afternoon tea was another new element that I’ve been thinking about for a while, partly to combat the afternoon slump and partly because, well, who wouldn’t want a writing retreat with afternoon tea? It just seemed like it would be a lovely thing to do, and it was. Here they are waiting to be eaten. Om nom nom!

How to achieve guilt-free procrastination!

Well ok, maybe not 100% guilt free. But pretty close.

Procrastination is part of the creative process, and berating yourself for being lazy isn’t helpful. In fact, using your willpower to force yourself do something leaves you exhausted and less likely to do it.

I don’t have an answer yet for how we can engage both parts of our brains and just do things without delay. But I do have a technique that takes into account the fact that we’re human and encourages you to leverage procrastination time instead of using all your willpower to ‘behave’ (boring!).

I tried it at yesterday’s writing retreat and it worked. I wasn’t even tempted to sneak onto email during working time. I don’t know if it has an official name, but to me it’s the Procrastination Station.

——-

So. Your Procrastination Station is nothing more than a simple bit of paper/post-it note.

On it, you write a small selection of up to 5 things you can do to procrastinate.

You are allowed to do these things as much as you like without feeling bad, so pick carefully – hopefully the shame of writing ‘check Twitter and Facebook 86 times’ will hold you back a little.

——-

 I heard recently of a writer who can knit for as long as she likes as long as she stays in her writing chair. She wants to get her knitting done and it’s good thinking time, so this is perfect. I sometimes have a plan B when I start writing in case I get stuck, so I’d put another writing project or two on the list.

This way when you waste time you’re doing something useful, but of course you need to know what it is you should be doing. And if you’re on a tight deadline you won’t have time for this, but otherwise it’s super-useful.

Try it, and let me know if it works…

***The deadline to join July’s Get Writing! Bootcamp is Friday 1st July! Join us here***

From the wonderful XKCD (click the cartoon to procrastinate a bit more)

How’s your writing going? Well? Or are you procrastinating? maybe feeling a little bit guilty about how lazy you are?

I’ve been reading a book called Switch: How to change things when change is hard. In Switch, Chip and Dan use the analogy of a rider on an elephant to describe the relation between the conscious, rational mind and the emotional subconscious.

What they found, unsurprisingly, is that changing habits requires the engagement of both parts of the brain. And that the self-control and self-supervision required to change any habitual behaviour are exhaustible resources. So if you have to think about what you’re doing or control your behaviour, which is the case if you’re trying to change something or convince yourself to do something *coughwritecough*, the act of doing that will sap your willpower and leave you with less ability and drive to keep at your task.

 ‘And when people exhaust their self-control, what they’re exhausting are the mental muscles needed to think creatively, to focus, to inhibit their impulses, and to persist in the face of frustration or failure’.

What looks like laziness, they found, may be mental exhaustion.

How does this relate to writing? Well, I’ve been thinking for a while that willpower alone can’t be the best way of making yourself write. That constantly thinking about time management, productivity, more words, improving productivity and thinking you never quite get enough done and lack willpower is, well, creatively counter-productive. It’s difficult and tiring, and I don’t enjoy starting from a negative point where I’m forcing myself to do something. Do you?

Starting creative endeavours is hard, yes. Resistance and fear are common and imposing structures like timetables or deadlines to aid willpower is useful. But why do we tend to think that writing is a struggle when it’s actually the lack of writing that troubles most of us? Why do we worry about how lazy and bad we are for procrastinating rather than trying to engage both parts of our brains so that we really want to work?

Maybe we’re just wearing ourselves out. Maybe we’re approaching it from entirely the wrong angle, and things would be much easier if we could find a way to engage both elephant and rider, of making the desire to write stronger than the resistance.

What do you think?

So. By now you’ve heard about the fantastical procrastination-busty 4 weeks of online bootcamp goodness designed to get you writing again? The one in July?

No? (what do you mean I need to calm down and stop making words up?)

Well then go and look here.

There’s a free little exercise to help you make time to write too. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

OK, what do you think? You’d like to win a place? Cool!

Here’s how to win

1.  Write a short paragraph telling me why you write and what your biggest challenge(s) is(are) with writing at the moment. 300 words max.

2. Post it on your blog or website or facebook account with a link to this page: http://tinyurl.com/getwriting.

3. Let me know about your entry by pasting your entry and linking to it in the comments below or emailing me at hello@urbanwritersretreat.co.uk with the link and your entry. If you don’t have a blog/site/facebook, you can write your answer in the comments or email it to me.

Social Media Bonus

I’ll love you a little more if you take the first entry option (publishing your entry on your site and sending it to me), but you can also get bonus points by linking to http://tinyurl.com/getwriting on Facebook or Twitter (max one link on each per day please). These are just suggestions, feel free to share it your own way!

On twitter, your tweet must contain the #getwriting hashtag and link to http://tinyurl.com/getwriting 

e.g. I want to win a place on @urbanwriters’ #getwriting bootcamp! http://tinyurl.com/getwriting

To enter on Facebook, share your entry with an update along the lines of:

I want to win a Get Writing! Bootcamp place! http://tinyurl.com/getwriting

What you should know (my competition, my rules!)

Written entries must be under 300 words with no minimum word limit.

The competition closes at 20:00 (London, UK time) on Friday 17th June 2011.

You can enter from anywhere in the world.

The prize is a place on my 4 week online Get Writing! bootcamp, running from Monday 4th July-Sunday 31st July 2011. It cannot be swapped for anything else, though you can give it to another writer as a gift if you like.

If the winner has already booked on the bootcamp, I’ll refund their money.

I will pick the entry that I like best, and yes, I’m a biased judge.  Honesty and enthusiasm will get you a long way.

By entering, you agree to take part in publicity (although I would always warn you first).

I’ll announce the winner on or around Monday 20th June.

Ready. Set. Go!

Bet you *wish* you could draw like me

I’ve taken part in NaNoWriMo twice so far. 1,667 words a day when you haven’t a clue what you’re writing about is tough. The first time I completed the challenge (yay me!) but the second time round I got to 3 days and a manageable 7,000 words away from the end and… went out all weekend, got a hangover and didn’t bother finishing. Not my finest hour. But I still wrote 40-50,000 words in just a few weeks both times. All of the highest quality, of course.  

*ahem*   

 Anyway. What it showed me was how quickly steps add up, and how suddenly big projects start to look achievable. So, I wondered, where could this approach combined with the wisdom of MC Hammer (break it down!) get us?  

Imagine you’re going to take one day off writing a week to check and amend your story map/plan and break down what you’re going to write for the next week. This means that every day you can sit down and just write with minimal procrastination and angst. You wake every morning 45 minutes earlier, stumble to a desk and write 500 words. Or tuck your children into bed and walk immediately to your desk and start. On the train to work you spend 5 minutes thinking about what you’re going to write tomorrow and hearing conversations your characters might have, and every day you can see the words stacking up in front of you.   

500 words is completely achievable, even with a job – if you miss one day, just catch up on another.  

> After one week you’ve written 3,000 words. This doesn’t sound like much.

> But after 4 weeks you’ve written 12,000 words. Much better, more usable words than if you hadn’t taken one day a week off to check your progress.

> In 3 months you’ve written 49,000.

> That’s a whole novel in 6 months. From writing 500 tiny little words a day.

  Philip Pullman famously writes 3 pages every day by hand, a total of around 1,100 words. He’s done this every day for years. 1,100 isn’t a whole day of writing and it isn’t an inconceivable amount. In fact, it’s just one step every day.   How many words or how much time per day works for you? How many days a week? If you commit to it, where will you be in 6 months? In 2 years? 10 years?

The cumulative effect of taking small actions is huge, and that one little habit is something very powerful that makes everything suddenly look possible.

A couple of days ago there was something I wanted to write. I knew where I wanted to go and I could see in my head the finished piece and how happy I’d be when it was done.

‘Excellent!’ I thought, ‘time to write!’

But I found myself mysteriously reluctant to even sit at my desk, never mind open the notebook. Ever had that feeling? Yeah, I thought so.

That’s when MC Hammer came to the rescue. I was thinking about how I could use chunking (i.e. breaking a project into more manageable chunks) when the chorus of ‘U Can’t Touch This’ came into my head on repeat and I joined in with a little dance. ‘Break it down!’ he said, and I realised I hadn’t gone nearly far enough. The problem with breaking a project into chunks is that you tend to break them into logical chunks that should be small enough to manage – chapter 1, for example. But actually, ‘write chapter 1′ or even ‘write email’ is probably still far too big a task, particularly if you’re starting something new.

The trick is to break the work down much further into attention-span sized bits (i.e. pretty small, much smaller than you thought) but also, critically, to break it down into preparation and execution. If you don’t have a clear plan that you can actually look at to remind yourself of what you’re meant to be doing and pick just one task then it’s very easy to become overwhelmed by the thought of those 3,000 things you SHOULD do or write about or remember and do nothing instead.

So, what did I do? I did exactly as The Hammer told me. I pulled my notepad onto the floor where I was sprawled out procrastinating and drew two bubbles, one at the top of the page and one at the bottom, putting notional start and finish points in them.

Suddenly I had a path to follow and was able to sketch the major points I wanted to cover in the middle. You can do this in whatever way makes sense to you – you might put months down the side if your story covers the span of a year, or you might be outlining something like character development or even how you want your audience to feel as they read.

If you prefer not to plan, the outline that works for you might not be a linear one. It doesn’t matter, just note down a couple of things that spring to mind.

If this helps you see where you want to go, keep going and sketch in your outline until you can see a structure; if not, walk away from it for a few minutes then come back and write a couple more. You can break this task down as much as you need to and keep coming back!

Once you have this you can start adding more detail into your sections, creating a new page per section or aspect of work if this helps. Try adding 3 aspects, actions or events to each section – the amount per section you need might be different, so just play around a bit. Keep breaking your project down until things start to look clearer.

Do you have a piece of writing in mind? If you can, go and do a skeleton outline NOW. Don’t worry about the fact that you aren’t actually writing; the point of this is to do the hard work now so that when you come to write you’ve already worked the kinks out and know what you want to say, bypassing a large part of the mental friction that stops you actually writing.

Once you’re comfortable with the outline and you feel you’ve broken things down enough, go take a break. Then either start at the top or pick whichever small portion feels good to you, and write. Ignore all of the other sections or tasks until you’re done. If you get distracted by new ideas or things you should include elsewhere, just note them in the right place on your outline then carry on with what you were doing. Had enough? Then just take a break or leave it for the day. Coming back will be far less intimidating because you know what you need to write (your subconscious will keep working on this while you’re away too) and can pick any tiny section to work on, so starting again will be easier. If you find yourself resisting you can always pick one section and break it down further until you feel able to write.

I’d love to know if this works for you or any variations you use – you can share and see how other people are doing here.

Happy writing!

Charlie

PPS: You totally want to experience the joy of MC Hammer and his trousers in action now, don’t you? And who am I to deny you? Just click here.