With a lot of writers I’ve talked to, there’s a certain fear and evasion of writing retreats. It’s a feeling I can completely understand. The beautiful thing about writing is how simple and easy the basic act of it is. Sure, it takes years of practice, but all you really need to get started is a notebook, a pen, and literacy*. At it’s core, I love storytelling for the same reason I love running: even if it takes technique and practice to get good, at its core it’s really more of a basic human instinct than a talent. So wouldn’t time going to readings and workshops (time you could have spent doing actual writing) muck up the purity of the process? Isn’t spending money on some expensive retreat just a way to buy your way out of the hard, simple, long process of writing every day?
Yeah, maybe. But, all the same, the New York Writers Institute at Skidmore was one of the highlights of my life.
On its face, what I loved about it so much really doesn’t have much of anything to do with writing. The people were simply great to hang out with. During the two-week session we’d traded a memoir’s worth of anecdotes and generated a dictionary’s worth of inside-jokes. It was just plain fun to hang out with smart, interesting, funny peers in a beautiful college town. Being writers didn’t really have much to do with it.
Except it did. Even if most of our conversations weren’t about writing, there was a certain literary, observant element in everyone there, along with a knack for storytelling that made for great conversation. I don’t want to make the claim that writers are just plain better than normal people, but maybe really good writers are. And I don’t think I’m bragging by saying the rest of the people there were really good writers, because I was definitely in the back of the pack among them.
It was fascinating to meet the people at the institute as people first and writers second. I might be plagiarizing myself a bit here, but it was like how you need two eyes, two points-of-view a little bit removed from each other, to see anything in all its dimensions. People have parts of themselves they only reveal in writing, and parts of themselves that they edit out of anything they’ve written but that come through in the kind of comfortable conversation you only get after spending two weeks in very close contact with the same few couple people.
The workshop, the readings, but above all the conversation probably put my writing years ahead of where it would be otherwise (which still isn’t great, but it’s still better). Which is strange to say because I don’t think I can list a single rule for good writing that I learned there, or at least not any that I think are applicable in every situation. That’s the thing about writing, there are so many ways to do it that no one philosophy on the subject is going to be entirely satisfying. The best you can hope for is to submerge yourself in a buzz of advice, every seemingly universal rule contradicting about twelve others you’ve heard, and sort it out however you like.
I realize that I’m being very vague about the specifics of what went on there. That’s partly for other people’s privacy, partly because I don’t want to turn this into a parade of inside-jokes. So to give it some human element, I’ll list a few random memories: being body-slammed by a Princeton hammer thrower. A passionate debate about whether or not cross country is even a sport. Smoking a cigarette. Regretting smoking a cigarette. Being laughed at for how bad a job I did of smoking that cigarette. Writing a story about being bad at smoking a cigarette at an impromptu flash-fiction throw down. Too much ukulele music. A byzantine drinking game that I’m pretty sure they made up as they went along. Being surprised to meet people who use words like “byzantine” in normal conversation. Learning about a water tower out in the woods that college students wander towards on summer nights to buy drugs, apparently**.
Around the end of my time at the New York Writers Institute, I compared the experience to doping. The same way that cyclists draw blood at high elevations and inject it when they need to compete, I wished I could extract all the creative energy I felt there and pump it back into myself the next time I needed it. That’s a pretty weird analogy, and it even becomes stranger when you consider that I hardly wrote at all during the two weeks I was there, and for a month after I came home I couldn’t stick to any one project for more than a few days. But I think my time there did energize me in the way that I wanted, in that the advice and inspiration I got from Skidmore powered me through writing two novels (one worth revising, one definitely not), one novella, two scripts, every post on this blog, and more short stories than I can count.
After that last novel, though, I think my creative energy needs a bit of a recharge, which is why I’m looking forward to my return to the New York Writers Institute later this week.
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* Actually, working with disabled adults at Cow Tipping Press this summer, I’ve learned that even those requirements aren’t real. I copied down some truly excellent writing dictated by people who can’t read.
** If you want more out-of-context memories from an awesome two weeks, check out this video by Miguel Escoto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLhn6SpBtuA
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