Do You Need To Go On A Writers Retreat?

My friends! Hello!

I am back on the east coast after several days of looking around at the lush surroundings of the Carmel Valley in California saying people live here?? all the time????? Who knew? Anyway, I was a guest of the Northern California Writers' Retreat and I'm going to talk to you today about writers retreats. Because I would go back to this one as a writer and pay my own money for it.

But first, like, yes. We ALL need to go on a writers retreat. NEED is doing a lot of work here. We all NEED a quiet place to work in a beautiful setting where someone else makes the coffee every morning. This would fix me, as the kids say. I don't mean need here in terms of that. I mean need here in terms of this is the only way I will finish my book and this is the only way I will make connections to get a book deal.

In those terms, no, you do not need to go to a writers retreat. You don't need to go to a writers conference to get those things either.

What, you may be asking, is the difference between a writers retreat and a writers conference? Trees. The answer is trees.

At a writers conference, there are usually fewer trees in sight at any given time. Of course, settings vary, but writers conferences usually take place at convention centers or in large hotel ballrooms and you sit inside all day under florescent lights. This is good, because you don't have a lot of the distractions that come with trees, namely the outside world, noise, lying in the grass doing nothing, allergens, etc. I relish the feeling, especially in winter, of being tucked away in a place outside of time where we just get to talk about books and writing all day. That's what a writing conference is to me–an organized place where we can talk about books and writing and publishing all day, spearheaded by professionals, surrounded by community.

A writing retreat, though, usually has more trees in view–palm trees, pine trees, oak trees, whatever. While not all writing retreats take place in luxury accommodations (those put more emphasis on the RETREAT part, rather than the writing part), the main difference between a retreat and a conference is that the organizers usually intend for you to write at retreats, or to give you the opportunity to, and they do not intend to schedule you to the max with panel, panel, panel, lunch, panel, workshop, panel, mixer, dinner, collapse. At NCRW this weekend we actually talked about how this particular event is both a conference (we talked a lot about publishing as well as writing) and a retreat (free time, trees, etc), which to me is a perfect mix because I like to do both. There are other events that might use the words retreat and conference interchangeably, but all you have to do to find out the difference is look at last year's schedule of events. You'll know in a second which is which.

So, do you need to go on a writers retreat to finish your novel or meet an agent and get a book deal? No, you don't need to. Retreats can be cost prohibitive for a lot of (most) writers. You don't need to pay someone to make you sit down and write, though having paid that money can be a good motivation to get your butt in a chair once you've done it. It makes a lot of sense that many writers think if I could just get away somewhere and think I could solve this thorny plot hole. Or if I didn't have to make dinner every night, I'd have the time to write my 500 words every day. Or things along those lines. Haven't we all thought that? I thought it this very morning and I just came back from a writers retreat.

What a writers retreat gives you is space. It takes you out of your everyday surroundings and puts you in a place where your piles of dirty laundry are not nagging you. The cardboard boxes you need to break down and put in the recycling don't confront you every time you go into the garage. The pile of mail you need to deal with is not right next to your coffee mug every morning. A writers retreat provides you with a blank space so that the only things you have to deal with are the things you bring with you. That's supposed to be like soft pants and your laptop, but still includes things like imposter syndrome and fear, hence why the retreat itself won't fix you, but could provide you the time and space to fix yourself.

The most valuable thing a writers retreat gives you, besides physical space to write free of sock sorting, is the mental space to do it all. You most likely do not have to decide what is for dinner every night. Someone else probably makes the coffee. They already bought the filters and refilled the sugar packets. You can make your bed in the morning, if you want, but you probably do not have to wash the sheets at the end of the week. You most likely do not even need to decide the plan for the day, because the organizers have done that for you! You may only need to decide if you're going to Yoga for Writers at 3pm or not. This freedom from the litany of daily decisions is the greatest gift a writing retreat gives you. And oh my god is that valuable.

The best news is–you don't necessarily have to pay the costs of a formal retreat to get this benefit. You can DIY a writers retreat, solo or with friends, depending on your budget and what's available to you. You have to do more of the decision making up front (someone needs to bring the coffee filters) but once you get there, you can lay it all out and be done with decisions as much as possible, except the one where you decide to write on the couch, by the pool, or at the table. I've done writing retreats with my aunt in beach condos off-season. I've taken mini retreats with myself at bland, corporate chain hotels armed with a grocery bag of snacks from Trader Joe's. You can give yourself the gift of a writers retreat at various price points and at various levels of effort, and they can be restorative, productive, and soul-renewing.

They can't, however, force you to write. The biggest misconception about writing retreats is that they make you write. They don't. You can just as successfully scroll Instagram on your phone in the Hudson Valley as you can in your living room. You can snooze your alarm and avoid your revisions just as easily at home as in Carmel Valley. There's nothing magical about a retreat that will give you motivation, focus, energy, and the ability to write 5,000 words a day. You have to bring that with you, along with the soft pants. It's easy to think that if you could just get away, all the fog and worry and brain clutter of real life would melt away and you can get some real work done. That might be true. But you're the one who gets the work down wherever you are. The venue doesn't really matter.

Like this old Adam Sandler SNL Romano Tours bit says, a vacation can take you on a hike. It cannot make you like hiking. A writers retreat can give you time to write. It cannot MAKE you write.

Go on a writers retreat or to a conference, if you can. There you can be productive and learn things and meet people–even agents–and you can benefit from all those things. But neither a writers retreat nor conference will fix you or guarantee success and your lack of access to one is not the thing standing in the way of you becoming a best-selling author.

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XOXOOXOXOXOX,

Kate

Who am I and what is this? This is Agents & Books, a twice-weekly newsletter about writing, publishing, and the creative life. I've been an agent for almost 20 years, most of it at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, and I'm the author of soon to be two books: Write Through It: An Insider's Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life (Simon Element, 2025) and a picture book called Pay Attention to Me!, with illustrations by Rob Justus (Sourcebooks, 2026). If you haven't already, become a subscriber today. $5 a month or $50 a year. Same price since 2019!