Insights and thinking from a 4-day writing retreat
I have never identified myself as a writer, certainly not a good writer. I have had many fines from the grammar police and being a professional proofreader is possibly the most unsuitable job for me I can think of.
So if you'd said only a year ago that at the end of 2020 I'd be on a writer's retreat, I would have scoffed a little. But 2020 was that year when anything could happen. And so, between the 28th-31st of December at around 6pm, I found myself on a virtual writing retreat with coach and author Tara Mohr. I share some insight and experiences here that may have meaning to the way we work.
A learning experience with some unusual guidance
Before the retreat started, we were informed of a few community guidelines. The most notable one was the fact we were encouraged not to give advice or praise to others.
What an unusual and brave ask I thought when I first read the advice. In a forum where we’d be sharing our work and supporting each other, I wondered how much giving advice or admiration is just a natural thing we do.
The reasoning for this stipulation was to help us as writers and creatives stay tapped into our own intuition and our own voices. The aim being to build up our self-trust and seek answers from within ourselves.
It was interesting to observe removing praise and advice both in terms of seeing how people were interacting in the group forum and through the instances where I found myself stopping to think if I was about to add a certain comment in the Zoom chat window.
The different energy of writing and editing
During the first session on retreat, Tara encouraged us to free write without deleting even one word or sentence. We just had to hit return and try again. It looked and felt messy, but it highlighted my urge to go back and re-read words and to edit frequently, rather than let more words come to the page.
It reminded me of our impulse to check emails rather than push on with harder work tasks. That urge to do something easier and more satisfying than the strategic or creative work.
I’m thankful that this editing versus writing experience reminded me (in quite a confronting way) of the cost of context switching - the time and attention you lose when you switch frequently from different types of work or tasks.
As someone who’s currently juggling multiple clients and projects at the moment, it inspired me to plan my weeks a little differently in 2021 to reduce my own switching and hold some firmer boundaries.
The conflict of creativity with achieving goals or outcomes
This ended up being a huge take away and thought provoking area for me. It kept surfacing time and time again in Q&A sessions. It also answered one of the personal enquiries I was holding in 2020 - how do I balance my creativity and my outcome-goals driven mind?
We all have an innate and healthy human desire to be seen, heard, cherished and feel belonging. So of course we enjoy praise and don't enjoy criticism - it makes sense that we would naturally seek to gain the former and avoid the latter.
However, with too much focus and emphasis on this; or where we make seeking the gold stars the primary driver of what we do, we stifle our own creativity and fail to be as brave or authentic as we could be.
Over the past few months I’ve had a lot of discussions with various professionals around LinkedIn and felt like this is a place where this conflict is constantly in play. If likes or engagement is the primary goal of posting, then we’ll be more inclined to follow what we see working to attain the visible ‘success’. However, usually it’s the creativity, generosity or originality that people admire and like the most.
How can we show instead of tell?
In one of the sessions, Tara asked us to write without adjectives or adverbs to describe an experience. We were encouraged to use imagery, metaphors or a creative analogy instead.
I’ll admit now, I was so clunky with this I had to laugh about it afterwards. I described a flapjack as a being like a brick of sugar and feeling the air on my face as if a freezer was right in front of me. Then I shared this back with my group who had all whipped up beautiful prose that were like pieces of art themselves.
Whilst I felt well and truly like a messy beginner during this activity, it was intriguing as I had never come across or given any thought to the use of adjectives before this time. The point of it was to encourage us to show rather than tell in our writing.
And I wondered, how can we show more creatively rather than tell at work when we want to convey or communicate something - either with our actions, vivid descriptions or metaphors?
The relationship of grief and creativity
If there's a time when the world seems to be experiencing mass grief, it’s now. The grieving of the world as it was; grieving of loved ones lost and the grief we experience with the continued loss of our freedoms.
We hear it in songs and read it in poems. We hear artists claim their work as their therapy - often also describing how grief brought out deeper creativity within them.
However, there is also an element of grief in creativity and commitment. When we start a new project or try to create something new, it can be the case we think it will feel right if it's right. But in fact, to really commit to something, we need to grieve the loss that will accompany it - the lost time, opportunity cost or the sacrifice that's involved.
If we can’t recognise this process, we are more likely to give up on a project or let it drift. It becomes too hard or we feel our motivation has waned, when really we haven’t accepted the associated loss with what we are trying to achieve.
What did I feel after all of this?
This retreat felt like the soft balm you might apply to cracked skin - it softened me, increased my presence and felt nourishing. It also made me feel a little less lonely - my doubts and fears around cultivating my creativity through writing were echoed in many of the Q&A sessions.
With many academics in the group along with women in a range of professions all over the world, the discussions were intellectual, culturally informative and rich. Those lost days between Christmas and New Year felt structured and exciting, making for an unusual end to an unusual year.
I hope you enjoyed reading and feel free to ask any questions about my experience on the retreat. You can learn more about Tara’s amazing work at www.taramohr.com and I would highly recommend her book Playing Big.