I’ve been thinking about all the writing that I need to get done this year. There’s three book contracts, yes three, and a host of papers which are undoubtedly going to need revising. Looking at all this unfinished work, I feel that familiar academic mixture of determination and dread. I know exactly what needs to happen. I also know exactly how difficult it will be to make it happen amid everything else.

The irony isn’t lost on me that I run writing retreats. I facilitate them, create the conditions for others to do their writing. I see what happens when people get dedicated time and space away from their usual obligations. I watch the transformation that occurs over just a few days, witness the relief and renewed energy people feel when they can actually focus on their work. I know, intimately and empirically, that writing retreats are enormously valuable. And yet somehow, I never quite prioritise attending one myself. Which is to say that I do for others what I sometimes struggle to do for myself.

But let me lay out the case anyway, partly for you and partly as a reminder to myself about why these retreats matter.

Space to think differently

The most fundamental thing a writing retreat offers is spatial and temporal displacement. You are somewhere else, doing something else, being someone else for a while. This isn’t merely pleasant; it’s significant. The academic everyday is so densely packed with obligations and interruptions that we’ve normalised a state of constant fragmentation. We tell ourselves we’ll write between meetings, after marking, once term ends. But these stolen moments rarely allow for the kind of deep, sustained thinking that complex writing requires.

When I’m running a retreat, I watch people arrive still vibrating with the frequency of their normal lives  They check email compulsively, worry about what they’re missing, mentally rehearse all the things they should be doing instead. But within hours, sometimes even minutes, something shifts. The physical removal from familiar environments lets them access different modes of thought. That argument they’ve been stuck on for weeks suddenly reveals its logic. The structure they couldn’t see becomes obvious. The confidence they’d lost starts returning.

This isn’t magic. It’s simply what happens when you create actual space,not just time slots in a calendar, but genuine openness where ideas can unfold at their own pace. We think with our environments, and different spaces afford different kinds of thinking. The cottage in the countryside or the desk overlooking the sea isn’t just a change of scenery; it’s a different thinking-writing context altogether.

The gift of sustained attention

Related to this spatial shift is the possibility of sustained attention. Slow scholarship is counter-cultural in contemporary academic life. We’ve been trained to multi-task, to switch rapidly between different projects and priorities, to respond immediately to every demand. This busyness has become so pervasive that we’ve forgotten what sustained attention feels like. A writing retreat offers permission to do exactly one thing for an extended period. No apologies, no justifications, no sense that you should really be doing something else.

This matters enormously for the kind of writing most academics do. Whether you’re working on a journal article, a book chapter, or your thesis, you sometimes need hours of continuous engagement to hold the whole argument in your mind simultaneously, to feel the shape of what you’re trying to say, to hear the rhythm of your prose. You need time to read back through what you’ve already written, to remember where you were heading, to pick up the thread of your thinking. While you can do a lot in short spaces of time, you can make a huge difference if you have even one bout of extended time in a year.

When participants at retreats talk about what made the difference, they almost always mention this: the luxury of uninterrupted time, the ability to stay with a thought until it’s fully developed, the relief of not having to constantly context-switch. It sounds so simple, but it’s increasingly rare.

Community and solidarity

What surprises people who haven’t attended a writing retreat is how valuable the collective dimension can be. Writing is fundamentally solitary, and the idea of writing alongside others might seem counter-intuitive. But there’s something profoundly sustaining about shared endeavour. Knowing that others are also wrestling with their own writing challenges, struggling with their own recalcitrant paragraphs, builds a sense of solidarity that individual isolation cannot provide.

I see this particularly strongly when I’m facilitating. The retreat communities that emerge are characterised by generosity and mutual support rather than competition. Everyone is there because writing is challenging. There’s honesty in that shared admission. No one is performing expertise or pretending it’s easy. This creates conditions for genuine exchange about craft, struggle, and process, the conversations that rarely happen in formal academic spaces but that matter enormously when you’re actually trying to write.

The accountability these communities provide is also significant. Not the punitive accountability of deadlines and surveillance, but the gentler kind that comes from showing up for each other. When you know others are also showing up for their writing, you’re more likely to show up for yours. And when you inevitably hit a difficult patch, there are people around who understand that difficulty without judgment.

Permission and self-worth

Perhaps the most important thing a writing retreat offers is permission to treat your writing as valuable. Academic culture is remarkably good at making us feel that our research doesn’t quite matter enough to justify focused attention. There’s always something more urgent, more important, more deserving of our time. Students need us. Committees need us. Administration needs us. These demands are real, but they can also become an excuse for avoiding the writing.

Attending a retreat forces you to claim that your writing matters. Not in some distant, abstract way, but concretely, right now. This act of prioritisation can feel almost transgressive, especially for early career and contract researchers who’ve perhaps had the message that they should be grateful for any opportunity and shouldn’t ask for time or space for their own work. But treating your writing as legitimate and important isn’t selfish. It’s necessary. You cannot produce good scholarship while simultaneously believing that your scholarship doesn’t deserve serious attention.

Your research matters, your ideas deserve development, writing is real work that requires real time. And I mean this absolutely. I just don’t always apply the same logic to myself 🙂

Mental health and sustainability

The relentless pace of academic life takes a toll. The constant context-switching, the inability to ever feel caught up, the sense that whatever you’re doing you should be doing something else generates a particular kind of exhaustion that makes writing feel impossible. A retreat offers respite from this unsustainable intensity. It’s a recognition that sustainable scholarly productivity requires rest, space, and boundaries.

There’s something restorative about giving yourself over to one activity for a defined period. The simplicity of waking up and knowing your only job today is to write can be remarkably calming. No competing demands, no guilt about neglected tasks, just this one thing. That kind of focused presence is genuinely nourishing. I watch people arrive at retreats looking exhausted and leave looking lighter, even when they’ve been working intensively. The difference is that they’ve been working on something they care about, with full attention, and that turns out to matter.

And yes, productivity

Finally, and only finally, there’s productivity. Writing retreats help you actually produce writing. This might seem obvious, but it’s worth stating clearly: if you spend three days doing nothing but writing, you will have more written than if you try to fit writing around everything else. The mathematics are simple, even if making it happen is not.

The productivity that emerges from a retreat is often different from the output of deadline-driven urgency. You can be more considered, more coherent, often more interesting. When you have time to think properly about what you’re writing, you write better things. You make connections you wouldn’t have made in shorter bursts. You find the through-line of your argument. You develop your ideas more fully.

And perhaps most importantly, a retreat can help you build momentum that carries forward beyond the retreat itself. Those days of intensive writing can remind you what your project is really about, why you care about it, what you’re actually trying to say. That renewed clarity and enthusiasm can sustain your writing long after you’ve returned to regular life.

So there it is: all the reasons why writing retreats work. I know this from experience, from watching it happen, from creating the conditions that make it happen. Perhaps this year, instead of just facilitating retreats for others, I should actually attend one myself. Because that list of writing I need to complete isn’t getting any shorter, and all the excellent reasons I give other people for prioritising their writing apply equally to me. At some point, the words actually need to get written – mine included.