A Dream With A Pen In Its Hand – Creative Writing Retreats To Expand Your Writing
Good writing sounds like someone speaking in a voice truer than the voice they use for gossip and scolding – it sounds like someone in particular, talking to someone they love about something they know well.
Learning to write well means understanding the balance been a kind of fierce attentiveness and a wild, reckless abandon in your thoughts and your words. Finding this balance can be tricky in the chaos of the modern world and escape to a writing retreat somewhere tranquil can be just the thing.
In creative writing, what you write about matters much less than how you do the telling. Voice, in other words, is just about everything in a novel or a short story, a poem or a memoir or an essay. The narrative is just the task that gets the writer to the table: it’s the vessel that floats the voice. Though of course the tale (the plot, the topic, the setting) counts, it’s the telling the reader really reads, and it’s the telling that lasts. To tell you what a good book is about is to tell you next to nothing about the book. What lasts is everything not reducible to the narrative.
David Malouf has said that we keep reading books we love not so much to find out what happens next, but because we can’t bear to break the spell of the writer’s voice. And I have a feeling he knows what he’s talking about.
Learning to write well means finding the ability to write as if you are talking – but not the everyday you – the you from way down deep. Your own voice needs to come from within you and then its naturalness and honesty will shine through. But many writers struggle to find their own voice and struggle even harder to get that voice down on paper. Developing the writer’s tool-bag of techniques such as sentence craft and rhythm will help your natural buy prescription drugs on line voice come through and at a writing retreat these are the things you will concentrate on.
“Writing,” said John Updike, “is only reading turned inside out.” You learn most of what you need to know about how to write like no one but yourself by reading well. So you may often find yourself reading, as well as writing, in a masterclass.
And, you’ll probably find yourself dreaming at a writing retreat. “Writing is dreaming with a pen in its hand,” a quote from a writer and poet from Australia. buy prozac So, when you go to your first writing retreat, make sure you take a pen and do some dreaming. Let the peace and quiet of the retreat take you to your dreaming place and find yourself way down deep. The writing will rise to the surface and your dreams will reach the paper.
Looking to find a writing retreat somewhere different? There are many workshops running through the year at Paradise Courses. You’re sure to find something you love.