DIY Writing Retreat Set-Up

I designed my week-long writing retreat to focus on three areas that are important to my personal development: writing, (revising my current WIP or “work in progress,” a horror novel in its sixth draft); learning, (reading and writing exercises from a workbook on writing horror); and reading comparative horror novels. I also included down time, exercise, and breaks for meals in my daily schedule. 

My hubby found an AirBnB we could retreat to and vowed to prepare my meals over the week-long retreat that coincided with my birthday, joining me and supporting what I was trying to do. 

Nourishing the Body 

No matter what writing space or position is most comfortable for your body, it’s important to remember to move around. Get up, stretch in place, change positions. The older I get, the harder it is to recover physically after being in a particular position for long stretches of time. I need to remind myself to sit comfortably and to move!

When I get into a groove while writing, I don’t want to get up and out of my chair to go to the bathroom, let alone prepare a meal. But I know that if I don’t feed and water my body, I won’t be able to work at my peak level of performance no matter what I’m doing. 

I scheduled three meals a day during my retreat, and when I took those breaks, I moved to the dining table. I didn’t panic thinking I was infringing on my writing practice, because those breaks were accounted for in my schedule.  

If you’re lucky to have a significant other who is willing to prepare your meals, I can now say from experience that it’s wonderful. Especially if they’re a good cook. But even if you’re on your own, don’t skip feeding the body! Do some preparation ahead of time. Order in. Bring prepared meals you can microwave. Utilize restaurants or grocery stores nearby. Whatever you decide, just schedule enough time in your day to limit anxiety and maximize the time for your writing practice. 

One other note about setting up your space. It’s nice to get away, but staying at home you know what you’re in for. Our AirBnB was a place we’d never been to before, more rustic than expected, and with some surprises we were well-prepared for. The anxiety that arose from being in an unfamiliar and uncomfortable place was not helpful. Which leads me to the next point. The importance of sleep to nourish the body. 

One of my birthday wishes was to have my cat with me during my retreat. I miss him when I travel. Unfortunately, during this retreat, I learned that he is NOT well suited for travel. He spent nights crying, pacing, and running over the top of me while I was trying to sleep. One of the unwelcome surprises at the retreat location was the serious rodent action that drove our cat crazy. By day two, I was suffering from sleep deprivation. That led to napping during the day, screwing up my schedule. 

Nourishing the Mind 

I’d designed my retreat to get the maximum amount of work done on my writing practice. I operate well within a schedule. I like routine. It was a good lesson that even the best laid plans can go sideways. Some deviations are outside our ability to control. Just as in life, in our writing practice, we must be aware and ready to accept these changes, and not let it mess with our heads, or move us away from our goals. 

The week of my DIY retreat, some of the worst storms in Californian history took place. There was torrential rain. There was flash-flooding. Gale force winds whipped trees out the ground. And there I was, hunkered down in a cabin in the woods, in the mountains, with an anxious cat, but we were fine.

Until the roof started leaking. 

Then the power went out. 

After a day without power, the caretakers provided us with a generator and a camp stove to cook on. I could recharge my laptop, cell phones, and power one lamp. I continued working. But by then, I was sleep deprived from cat and rodent shenanigans at night, dealing with a tarp-covered roof to keep the rain out, and the bricks that held the tarp down kept flying up and landing hard on the already compromised roof . . .

Then the scratching began. 

High up on a wall with a weird little door, too high for even a ladder to reach.

As a horror writer, it was inspirational. As for the retreat, it was not as motivating as I had planned.

I forged on, pivoted and shimmied my way along. I read about writing during the day and did my writing by hand when the laptop ran out of juice. I kept reading horror novels to regain some inspiration and wrote about my cabin experience. I tried to be kind and understanding to myself and took a nap when I needed one. Sure, my schedule went kerflooey, but I adapted and pressed on with my original goals, reminding myself that adversity builds strength for living life to the fullest.   

Nourishing the Soul

The real lesson? This DIY writing retreat was my doing. I planned it, and my experience and take-aways were ultimately up to me and me alone. When things didn’t work out according to the all-mighty schedule, there was no need for blaming or shaming myself, because I’d done the best I could to plan for what I wanted to accomplish. NOT everything that might happen. When one’s DIY retreat schedule goes topsy-turvy (some aspect almost always will), just go with it. Ride it out. Or change it. Or end it altogether if you’re not getting what you want out of the experience. 

On the next to the last day of our rodent-infested, cabin-in-the-woods, in-the-soggy-mountains experience, the sun returned, and the rain and the wind stopped raging. I was looking forward to having a “normal” day, with power for my laptop, and the afternoon walks I’d scheduled and missed because of the inclement weather. My husband looked at me and said, “we could leave today, if you want to.” I blurted out, “yes! Please!” feeling a rush of relief like never before or since.

It hadn’t even occurred to me until that moment that I could leave. I was planning to tough it out until the bitter end, by golly. It was a wonderful feeling knowing it was okay to head home, to end my DIY retreat a day early, get our cat back to his comfort zone and finish my retreat with maybe a day of horror movies on TV and a good night’s sleep. We immediately started packing up the car and the cat and got the heck out of there.

It’s okay to give yourself what you need to nourish your soul. Leave the retreat or take a day off from your writing practice if you need to. Do some yoga, meditate, listen to music to give yourself a break and to wind down from daily living, or just your writing time. It’s all good. Yoga is soul-nurturing for me, but it was hard for me to focus on my yoga practice while I was at the cabin. I was freaked out and on my guard most of the time. I listened to music, meditated, and ultimately departed the cabin completely. I lived well and wrote later.

Putting the Writing Retreat Experience all Together

What did I learn from my retreat experience? I learned a lot about what I want in my regular writing practice. I love putting words on the page. Making time for writing isn’t hard for me. What I discovered was that learning about writing motivates me. I was also inspired by reading books written by authors in my genre. Most of all, I learned to give myself some space. To feel free to fail. To remember to fill my body, my mind, and my soul so that I can keep doing what I love, what I need (I can’t not write, it’s in my blood).

My writing cup is now spilling over, and a full cup has plenty to go around. So, stay tuned!

A.H. Plotts writes and watches horror and dark sci-fi stories. She also likes playing in her garden, catching the waves, and eating delicious food on the California coast. Find her rantings all about it at www.ahplottsthecoast.com.

You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The post My DIY Writing Retreat: What it Taught Me about My Writing Practice appeared first on DIY MFA.

I write horror and dark sci-fi. My friend is a writer and an actor with a YouTube channel of short videos she’s made on her own. Last fall we partnered up to make a short film for a local Halloween film contest. I had a ghost story I’d been working on that I thought would be perfect for filming.

We would just need to transfer the story into script form. Or so I thought. I learned through the process that there is a lot more involved in taking an already written work and translating it into visuals for a movie. Taking those scenes and putting them into script form became one of the best exercises in showing the story, rather than telling it.

Finding a Format

I’ve had some experience writing scripts for original plays, but never had I taken a short story and turned out a script suitable for others to follow. I needed to refresh my memory about the basics.* While I was not concerned about sticking as closely to format as I would if I were writing a script to sell, there are some fundamentals to scriptwriting that I wanted to follow. In a nutshell, a script encompasses the dialogue, action, and settings for each scene in a film.

Some stage direction might also be included, but that’s usually left for the director to interpret. One thing you don’t see a lot of in a script is a description of emotions that the characters are feeling. Feelings are interpreted through dialogue and action, which is also what we see in great fiction. Great writers know how to tug on our heartstrings without telling us what emotions they want us to experience. Great actors are also good at this. They show us rather than tell us what their characters are feeling.

Putting it All Together

I was lucky with this script that I knew the story well. I also had a list of scenes and dialogue that the director pulled from the short story as suitable for filming. I couldn’t just copy and paste these scenes and dialogue as written directly into the script. I had to interpret them for the director and actors, to give them a sense of what the characters were feeling or thinking, without using a lot of description.

I had to turn feelings and thoughts into meaningful dialogue, body language and facial expressions in a limited number of pages. One page is equal to about one minute of film. Our movie was capped at 15 minutes. We had to be picky about what we put on film and what we left out. We needed a cohesive story with interesting characters. How were we supposed to do all of this in 15 pages?

I thought about each scene on the director’s shot list. About what thoughts and emotions needed to be expressed by each character in each scene. How the characters might best express those thoughts and feelings through dialogue, body language, and facial expressions. Silence is also a very powerful tool for telling a story without narration. I tried to stay consistent with the story arcs of each of the main characters as well as the overall meaning of the story as I was doing this.

Learning to Compromise

While the script was taking form, my filming partner and I were going back and forth with what I thought were too many substantial changes to the story based on changes we kept making to the unfinished script. We finally realized that what we needed was a better, and agreed upon, understanding of the characters in the story to settle on what it was that they were trying to accomplish in the movie.

We took some time off from the script and created mini-character sheets: what their relationships are to each other, what they want the most, and what is standing in the way of them getting it. We played with these characters for the scenes we wanted and ended up making some changes to their story arcs for the film to work.

This gets me to probably the most important lesson. While the short story I wrote was the basis for the script, the story that we ended up with for the film was not the same as the story that I wrote. In many ways, it was better than what I originally created. For purposes of showing rather than telling, some of the nuances I liked in my short story could not be communicated on the screen. Some of the original relationships between the characters were not presented strongly enough for film.

Rather than see these as flaws in my original writing, I saw much more clearly how the story arcs needed to be changed to show the story we were trying to tell for the movie. It helped me understand the characters better, by exploring them through the eyes and mind of my filming partner. I saw how I originally communicated the story in writing and how reinterpreting the characters’ motivations made them more believable.

Making these changes was tough for me, at first. I had some strong feelings about my story that I quickly learned to let go of in the interest of creating a better production. What we ended up with was a cohesive and chilling tale we are both proud of.

Sticking the Landing

Writing this script gave me many insights into how I write short stories and how I can improve my craft. It also showed me why written stories are sometimes changed for filming purposes. I used to be very disappointed when a film based on a written work did not stick to the story as written. I didn’t realize how challenging it can be to film thoughts, emotions, and nuances as they are on the page. Now, when I watch a movie that started as a novel or a short story, I think about the job of the screenwriters and how much work goes into translating words for the screen. I have a lot more empathy for those difficult decisions that bring stories to life on film.

*How to Write a Movie Script Like Professional Screenwriters (studiobinder.com)

After 20+ years with the U.S. government, A.H. Plotts (she/her) is finally settled (mostly) in California. When not at her desk writing horror and dark sci-fi, she enjoys delicious coastal cuisine, fun in the sun, and blogging about it at www.ahplottsthecoast.com. Find A.H. on Twitter (@ahplotts) and Instagram (@ahplottsthecoast) posting about her favorite authors, books, movies, cities, and restaurants.

The post Show, Don’t Tell: Your Story as a Movie Script! appeared first on DIY MFA.