Grace Dent on the ultimate writer's retreat

...as I question whether summer on the continent is the best setting in which to be productive.

Paris: gorgeous, but not boring enough. Photo by me.

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I’ve never been on a writers’ retreat, though I see pictures of them on Instagram sometimes. Bookish people in deckchairs with pen, paper and fresh lemonade, a Tuscan landscape behind them – or perhaps a view that goes from a laptop over a desk and out through a cottage window onto the Cotswolds/Northumberland/Pembrokeshire: it all looks very idyllic, peaceful and productive (and expensive).

Maybe it really is productive, because in that scenario, the writing is the whole point. If that’s the reason you’re there, and it’s what everyone around you is doing, then I can imagine that you sort of have to get on with it. Trying not to look like an idiot is a great motivator for me, so if I was being forced to have dinner with other writers who said things like, ‘Just the 6,000 words for me today, but you know what? I think they’re really good ones’ – I’d probably pull my finger out.

The closest I’ve come to a retreat myself was in 2019, when I took a week off work and booked an Airbnb in Paris with the intention of making progress on a novel. I think I chalked up quite a few thousand words, so the scheme worked – but it was helped, I suspect, by the fact that I didn’t know that many people in Paris at the time, and that it was January: not party time. (Despite my hard work, by the way, the novel died soon afterwards.)

I’m coming back to London on Sunday after seven weeks in France. I’m so glad that I came – my French has improved and I’ve made new friends and had a wonderful time, and I’ve kept my job and the newsletter more or less ticking along – but it has not been the prolific creative writing experience that I told myself it would be. Partly, that’s because I inadvertently brought myself with me to France. I did not magically transform into a different kind of person while crossing the English Channel.

I can also only assume that Paris was a lot more boring and more conducive to work when Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Oscar Wilde etc were living here.

The experience has reminded me of something the journalist and author Grace Dent spoke about when she came on the In Writing podcast (a hilarious episode – do listen). Here’s an edited extract.

With [my memoir] Hungry, yet again I was kind of seduced by the idea that you go on these retreats – people always say it to you, everywhere you go. Oh you should go away somewhere! You should go to a cottage. And what I’ve remembered again this time is that I work really hard doing everything else – I present television, I present radio, I do all kinds of stupid things – and if I put in a chunk of time to go off by myself to write a book, I love my own company and I get there and I’m just on holiday. [laughing] My literary agent and my TV agent and everyone’s like, Grace has gone for ten days to Italy to write her novel, so nobody bother her, and I’m thinking, Yeah… but I’m not really writing. I’m basically drinking lovely cocktails and sleeping. You leave me by myself and all I do is catch up on all the sleep that I haven’t had. So I come back and I’m gorgeously refreshed.

As her deadline approached and the second half of the book remained unwritten, however, Grace had an ingenious idea:

I booked myself into a Premier Inn. My feeling with this was – and I’ve done it a couple of times – there’s nothing to do in a Premier Inn. There’s nothing. They’re not bad hotels, but the only thing that you want to do is get out of the Premier Inn as soon as you can. And all it is is a desk and a not-very-good TV that’s too small and you can’t really watch it. There’s no mini bar, there’s nothing, and if you want to eat you have to go to whatever’s beside it, or you have to go to the supermarket and eat really sad food, you know, eat a Pot Noodle or something. So I really recommend that, to be honest. These fancy writer’s retreats where they say, oh we’re going to go to somewhere beautiful in Greece and walk on the beach every day and eat gorgeous food – no. I say, book into a Premier Inn at £28 per night, where the only place that you can go to is the Toby Carvery next door, and basically have almost a gun at your head to finish this book, and you’ll do it then.

So that’s my plan for summer 2023.

Part of the problem, as always, is that I pictured writing a book as though it would be like pouring water out of a large jug, and all you have to do is stand there for long enough holding the jug in the air. Basically, I realise as I am typing this, I was confusing the process with reading a book: sit there long enough and you’ll finish it.

But that is not what the experience is like. It’s much more like trying to mine for clay minerals – with no instructions or knowledge of mining – in order to make the clay, in order to make an enormous jug from scratch, and then having to improvise a kiln in the same way, and then sweating heavily and weeping until you have enough fluid to fill the enormous jug to the brim. And most days, I’d rather go and look at the Eiffel Tower than do that.

Look (I’m talking to myself here): it hasn’t been a total disaster. Unfortunately I will always continue to stumble along like this, because I am me. We all just have to keep on slogging.

I can’t afford to go anywhere for a while, but if you have hot tips on writers’ retreats and how to make the most of them, do share.

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Since I’m saying à bientôt to France, I want to recommend two wonderful Substack newsletters for fellow English-speaking Francophiles.

Lickedspoon with Debora Robertson

God, I love this newsletter.

Debora is a food writer who has recently-ish moved to Marseillan in the south of France. Her newsletter is full of recipes, photographs and details of the wonderful food she buys at the market, and beautiful descriptions of life there. It’s like a holiday in my inbox, and reading it brings sunshine into my mind. If Debora’s newsletter itself was a location, I would move there tomorrow.

Pen Friend

This is my funny, clever, creative friend Hannah Meltzer’s newsletter, and it’s brand new.

Hannah is a British journalist who has lived in Paris for several years. Like its author, Pen Friend is witty and full of insights on France that go far beyond the clichés we are usually served in the UK (‘French women stay thin even though the pastries are divine – here’s how to steal their style’ etc etc).

It includes her local recommendations (far more inventive than anything you’ll find on TripAdvisor), her beautiful illustrations, and this week, some thoughts on holidays. “It took me a few years to realise that ‘holiday’ or ‘vacation’ is not a good-quality translation for ‘Les vacances’, the French word for the summer break,” she writes. “This is because the two concepts are not the same thing.” Read more here.

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Back next week. Until then, good luck with your writing.