For many years I sought a brief respite every fall. A
retreat from slogging away at the day job as a reporter in Washington, D.C.,
and writing books and plays at night and on weekends. So every October I
attended a picturesque little writers’ colony in Vermont with my husband Bob, who
is also a writer and editor. We traveled
there to take advantage not only of the creative promise but also the intoxicating mad
splash of peak autumnal color and the peaceful Vermont landscape. (No, I’m not
identifying the place any further than this. It doesn’t exist anymore, and I’ll
just call it the Colony.)
Despite the place being somewhat down at the heels—and more
and more as time went by—the Colony House was a grand old mansion located in a
magnificent setting just off the village green. We writers occupied private
rooms (or shared them with a significant other), shared the bathrooms, fixed
meals in the communal kitchen, hung out in front of the fireplace in the library,
and held forth our writerly opinions in the dining room. Occasionally Bob would
carve a pumpkin or two, and we’d all tell tales, swap ghost stories, grumble
about or celebrate our writing careers, and visit the local cemeteries and collect
epitaphs from the headstones, sometimes bizarre and sometimes hilarious. The Colony
was a charming place where a core group of writers gathered every year, year
after year, and every year a few new writers joined the mix. It was usually a blend
of old friends and new faces.
A Fantasy World
Basically, a writers’ retreat is a tiny fantasy world. Writers
all want to find that magical place where our characters instantly come alive,
our dialogue clicks, our plot hits hyperspace, and well, magic happens. (In
addition to all of our usual magical thinking.)
But one thing always struck me as strange: Some of these
writers never wrote outside of the Colony. They saved up all their energy and
creativity for the one or two or three weeks they would spend there. Their lives were too busy to eek out precious minutes for writing. This was their only time to write. Their jobs were too stressful, their lives too full. Outsiders could never understand.
One writer
whose path I crossed for years was working on a musical based on Alice in Wonderland. You’re probably
thinking: That’s never been done.
Yeah, Alice has been done before and she will be again. Taking up a corner of
the library on a round wooden table near a baby grand piano someone had donated,
he’d set up his command center. He would take turns tinkling on the piano keys
and click-clacking on his laptop keyboard. He was creating. He explained he could only work on the play during those precious
few weeks each year. He’d been working on this play for years. It never seemed
to be approaching the finish line. One year he stopped coming. I don’t know
what happened to him or his play. (Alice still pops out of her rabbit hole from
time to time.)
Another writer one October had traveled to the Colony across
the country by bus, toting a big, bulky desktop computer in a cardboard box. Once
there, she found she was blocked the entire time and blamed the other writers:
We were noisy, inconsiderate, inspiration-sucking fiends. Or perhaps we were vampires.
Still another—allegedly a poet—frightened me. The poet, who seemed to be
desperately broke, would startle people by suddenly appearing silently out of
nowhere. At your elbow in the kitchen,
asking if you were going to finish your meal. At your side in the library, throwing
raw potatoes into the fireplace to bake.
She said she lived in a burned-out house in another state without heat
or electricity. We were a little afraid she’d burn down the Colony House over
our heads. But she was theoretically working on her poems at the Colony.
Writing Despite Everything Else
My opinion is that a writer is writing all the time, not
just in the rarefied air of the writers’ retreat. You have to be able to write
when you don’t feel like it. When it’s hard. When life interferes. Even
when you’re not putting words on paper, your mind is still building stories. That is also writing.
Let’s face it, some writers are like machines, computers
that never come unplugged and are always churning out pages. They produce two
and three and four books a year. Whether those are good books, who knows?
Others keep at it for years before producing any work. I don’t fall into either
camp. I lack the energy of the former group and the superiority of the latter.
Still, I found that I couldn’t work like some of the other Colony
House writers. In a lather in a corner of the library. Willing the muse to sit on my head and pour in inspiration. By the time we made it from Virginia to Vermont, dragged our
luggage up the stairs, collected our sheets and made the bed, I was already fried.
After reporting on government regulations during my days and creating fictional
worlds at night the entire rest of the year, I could barely walk and talk. Forget
chewing gum. I slept. A lot. Copiously.
Deliciously. Fabulously. In fact, I observed that many of the writers at the
Colony routinely spent the first two or three days of their stay zonked out in
their rooms, only rousing for food.
The Magic of Recuperation
I needed that retreat as much, if not more, than those writers who hoarded their creative juices all year in anticipation of their annual two-week flood of inspiration. Many an October at the Colony I simply could not write more than a page or two. Depleted resources created a black hole inside of me. So instead of staying in my room pretending to write, I walked and talked with Bob and let the healing power of rest (and the fall colors) take over. In my experience, creative rest periods are highly underrated. Many a plot twist and character nuance were worked out as we ambled under the flaming maples, past the green fields and the harvest-ready corn, and paused to consider those lazy but contented Vermont cows.
Many of my characters emerged out of that fallow time every
fall. It was at the Colony House where I came up with the opening lines of my
first Crime of Fashion mystery novel, Killer
Hair. (Now there are ten books in the series. More to come.) It was there
that I first sketched out the beginnings of my new thriller, The Dollhouse in the Crawlspace. I
remember returning to the Colony one fall with my very first published novel
under my belt (and in my hands), more exhausted than ever, to find the seasonal
creative geniuses of October suffering over their never-finished prose and
casting dark looks my way whenever I would leave the house to wander the woods and
ponder future stories and projects. The October-only writers didn’t understand
my writing process. I was writing! I
was just not physically putting that many words down on paper that October.
That would come later, after I returned to Washington and felt revived and
ready to tackle new words, and worlds.
Though they hadn’t finished a book or a play, the Writers of
October took the moral high ground. I
suffer therefore I am—a writer. By heaven, you were supposed to stay in
your room, ignore the autumnal glory, and bleed sweat onto the paper. Or the
computer keyboard. Weeping in the throes of creativity was not looked down
upon, but enjoying yourself out in the world certainly was.
I couldn't let this attitude stop me from enjoying my time at
the Colony. It was the deep rest, the sigh, the exhale I needed in order to continue writing. I required that fallow
time, and I still do.
I will always be grateful for that shabby white mansion near
the village green. The hot cider I drank, the sweaters I wore, the blazing
autumn leaves I crunched through, the crisp intoxicating air I breathed.
Without it all, I could never have been as productive in the rest of my writing
year. And that is the truth (my truth, anyway) about the writers’ colony, and
the writers of October.
