This past January, I took a train journey from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg via the Amtrak Pennsylvanian for a one-night solo getaway.
I realize that much about the previous sentence is objectively odd, but there’s a story behind it. And it starts with a question. In fact, it starts with the question. The one that writers are asked more often than any other:
“Where do you get your ideas?”
My answer to this question almost always disappoints people. Getting ideas isn’t the problem. The problem is that I’m going to run out of time before I run out of ideas.
Time. In my ongoing and unending writer’s journey, time is always the ultimate adversary. There’s never enough of it. I always feel like I could make so much progress if I could just have a few days to devote utterly and completely to whatever project I happen to be working on. So I’ve always wanted to try a solo writing retreat. A couple of days where I disappear from my everyday life and devote myself solely to writing.
Admittedly, I wasn’t certain this would actually work in terms of making me more productive. Even with all the time in the world, would I get sick of writing after a couple of hours and burn out? And even if it did make me more productive, I wasn’t convinced I would enjoy the process. Still, I wanted to try it out and see what happened, but I’d never pulled the trigger on booking a trip.
Then, in 2023, my wife, knowing that this was something I was interested in doing, set me up with a surprise birthday present: a solo two-day trip for me, myself, and I to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to dedicate to my writing.
Quick side note: If right now you're thinking that Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is about the most random destination you can think of for a solo writing retreat, you’re not wrong. See, I had been talking about the possibility of taking a train when I finally did go on a writing retreat, and it turns out, train tickets to Harrisburg are super cheap in January — presumably because nobody in their right mind wants to go there in the dead of winter. Seeing as the tickets were so cheap, my wife figured it would be a good trial run. And since this was my first attempt at a writing retreat, I agreed. I love a good deal. (And imagine dropping a butt-load of money on an excursion to a picturesque location only to be humbled by crippling writer's block.)
Anyway, how my eight- and six-year-old daughters kept this trip a secret leading up to my birthday is anyone’s guess. Apparently, they knew about it for weeks. (Just for reference, when I got my wife tickets to an opera performance for her birthday, the kids only knew about it for 24 hours and still managed to let the cat out of the bag). In hindsight, my oldest daughter did hint that my present involved “peace and quiet from us.”
Imagine my surprise when I unwrapped my gift on Thursday evening and learned that my train left at 7:00 a.m. Saturday morning.
Next stop, Cucamonga.
What is a writer’s retreat?
So, what is a solo writing retreat, anyway?
Basically, the idea is to escape from the everyday world for a few days and focus on creative work, ideally in an environment that is conducive to creativity and free of distractions. Writers sometimes take solo retreats to remote scenic locations. A secluded cabin in the middle of the woods. A private room at a mountain lodge. A beach house. A rural farm. You get the picture. And if right now you're thinking, Wait, don't several Stephen King novels start out the way you're describing? You would be right.
Spoiler alert: I fortunately did not go crazy with a shining axe in a mountain lodge, endure the misery of being hobbled by an insane fan, or develop a murderous alternate personality near the secret window overlooking my secret garden.
The idea of a solo writing retreat is a romantic (and perhaps somewhat melodramatic) concept. In theory, it seems ideal. The real question is, do writing retreats work? That is what I intended to find out. And I endeavored to do so with as few Stephen King-esque complications as possible.
Pardon me, boy, is this the Pennsylvania station?
The journey began with a (very) early-morning drive from my home in northwestern Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh Union Station. This being my first train ride and not knowing quite what to expect, I arrived at the station earlier than is my tendency, so it was here that I would pen the first words of my trip.
To my surprise, I found a downtown train station pre-7:00 a.m. in the dead of winter to be a favorable environment for writing. I had no complaints about the seating, and my fellow travelers waiting for their trains were too lethargic and bleary-eyed at that hour of the morning to distract me from my work. The only exception was one Amish family; they didn’t distract me, either, but out of everybody in that station, they were the most awake. (I surmised that they were no strangers to that side of sunrise.)
My boarding call was announced, so I jotted down a quick note with my location, time, and word count so far before making my way to the train. I had decided it might be interesting to track these things. (Unless my output turned out to be horrible, in which case I would stop tracking and wallow in self-loathing as creative people do.)
Saturday, January 28
Time: 6:45 a.m.
Location: Pittsburgh Union Station, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Word Count Total: 467
In case you didn’t know, I’m a freelance writer, screenwriter, and novelist. I write fantasy, science fiction, and whatever else strikes me as interesting. At the time of my 2023 writing retreat, my work-in-progress was the final book of a series that started all the way back in 2013 when I took a wild leap and decided — without seeking representation, without attempting the traditional publishing route, without even showing my manuscript to another human being until the eleventh hour — to self-publish an epic YA fantasy novel called The Fallen Odyssey. The finale of this series, ten years in the making, is what I was working on throughout the course of my writing retreat. I was working on a lot of climactic scenes and epic final battles. It was all very action-heavy.
Perhaps counterintuitively, it’s the fast-paced, action-heavy scenes that often take me the longest to write. I really work hard to get the wording just right on describing a few seconds’ worth of action. That said, scenes like this are also a heck of a lot of fun to write, even if there is a lot of pressure to get them right.
This was my first journey by train. I’d been on plenty of commercial flights before, so I was expecting a similar experience: generally unpleasant, but a necessary evil to get where you want to go.
The view from the exterior told me this train was old. Plus, the tickets were cheap. I assumed the ride wouldn’t be much fun and not a great place to get any writing done, but I figured I could put up with the discomfort.
Given my low expectations, you can imagine how blown away I was by the huge amount of legroom and the unexpected comfort of the entire experience. Far from the anxiety-inducing experiences I’d become used to with air travel, this train journey was… relaxing. And, at the risk of turning this into some sort of weird plug for Amtrak, to be honest, the whole experience made me wish I could go everywhere by train.
We started moving, and I took in the view for a few minutes. The railyard. A billboard featuring Fred Rogers. Old steel factories long ago converted to other uses. And then, it was time to get the laptop back out.
Hooked up to the train’s Wi-Fi, I put on my headphones, and it was off to the races.
As it turned out, the inside of a moving train is a fantastic place to write. It’s no exaggeration when I tell you that I typed almost nonstop from ’burgh to ’burg, pausing only once to visit the dining car for a cup of coffee. Before I knew it, I was nearing my destination: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Saturday, January 28
Time: 12:15 p.m.
Location: The Amtrak Pennsylvanian
Word Count Total: 2,669
It was only midday, and I had already surpassed what was traditionally my daily word count goal: 2,000 words. So far, so good.
Little did I know what the rest of the day had in store for me.
It was the kind of clear, sunny day that is highly atypical for late January in Pennsylvania as the Amtrak Pennsylvanian crossed the Susquehanna River. A delay on the rails ahead of us caused us to pull into Harrisburg Station a bit later than our estimated arrival time, but seeing as my schedule was 100 percent flexible, I had no room to complain. In fact, I still had a couple of hours before check-in time at my Airbnb.
Instead of using Uber or Lyft or renting a car, I’d decided it would be fun to rely solely on my own two feet for this trip. So, after finally disembarking from the train and exploring the station’s impressive architecture for a while, I walked a few blocks down North Fourth Street in search of that favorite haunt of writers everywhere: a quiet little coffee shop. Denim Coffee, on the corner of North Fourth and Walnut Streets, fit the bill.
In addition to being the perfect place to sit and write for a while with a cup of coffee, Denim Coffee offered an impressive view of the Pennsylvania State Capitol complex and the park that surrounds it. After ordering a coffee, I asked the guy behind the counter if he would mind if I set up by the window and did a little work. “No problem, man,” he said, which I took as the go-ahead to stay for hours.
Saturday, January 28
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Location: Denim Coffee, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Word Count Total: 4,000 (on the dot!)
Not that this is significant to anybody but myself, but it was while I was at this coffee shop that I broke the 100,000-word mark in my manuscript. For reference, that's about 400 standard-industry-sized pages in novel format. I estimated that the book would be about 130,000 to 140,000 words long when all was said and done. (It turns out I was WAY off, but that’s a story for another time…)
The law of diminishing returns
After the coffee shop, I played tourist for a while, wandering through Harrisburg’s South of Market neighborhood and Riverfront Park, with its view of City Island on the river. At the risk of sounding like a very old man, the historic railroad bridges that span the Susquehanna River here are amazing when you think about the amount of work that must have gone into constructing them.
Walking south along the riverfront, I made my way to my Airbnb.
I had to wait about an hour longer than expected for my room to be ready, but that wasn’t a big deal. More time to write. Here’s a snippet of a rather loud exchange I overheard between the building’s owner and the property manager while I was waiting to check in:
“THIS. IS. NOT. CLEAN.”
“What do you mean? It’s nice in here.”
“It’s filthy. A guest walks in here and sees this, and — Bam! Four-star review!”
When it came time to check in officially, I only had one question for the building manager. If I intended to stay out late, would it be safer to walk back along the riverfront or through town? He responded, “Well, as a very gay man who walks everywhere, often late at night, I’ve never had any problems.” He punctuated this statement with a rafter-shaking burst of laughter. “I guess that’s good enough for me!” I said.
Later, I would leave a Bam! Five-star review for this Airbnb. The property manager was right; it was nice in there.
It was just before sundown when I headed out in search of something to eat. And perhaps a corner booth or the end seat at a bar where I could do a bit more writing. I ended up at Bacco Pizzeria & Wine Bar on North Second, across the street from the Hilton Harrisburg. I was starving, so I dove right into my pizza.
Needs a little salt, I thought, and added some from the shaker on the table.
Good stuff, I thought. Sauce is nice and sweet. Could still use a little more salt, though.
I added some.
Really good, I thought. Can’t get over how sweet the sauce is!
At this point, I’d put so much salt on my pie that it practically crunched.
Okay, why can’t I taste this freaking salt?
Using my fingertip to test the salt from the shaker, I uncovered the secret behind the sweetness of their sauce. Instead of informing the server that my saltshaker was filled (mistakenly, I presume) with straight-up white sugar, I decided to pay it forward to the next diner. Sweet-tooth pizza isn’t bad. Then I took out my laptop, put on my headphones, and got back to work on my novel.
Objectively, a crowded restaurant/bar doesn’t seem like a good environment for creative work requiring intense concentration. But, yet again, I was surprisingly productive here.
I began to wonder, is it the environment I’m in? Or is it the environment I’m not in?
Is it simply the act of getting away from one’s usual spots that makes it easier to work? Is it the anonymity in public that you experience when going to a place where no one knows you and sitting down, effectively alone in a crowd with only your work, that opens up new creative channels?
I don’t know. What I do know is this: Words done got written.
Saturday, January 28
Time: 6:30 p.m.
Location: Bacco Pizzeria & Wine Bar, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Word Count Total: 6,063
Part of me had set out for dinner thinking that my night was just beginning. After I got something to eat and wrote at the restaurant for a while, I planned to head out to a bar where I could stay late into the night and get even more writing done. But, by this point, I was starting to feel pretty tired. Tired enough that I knew I was about to hit the law of diminishing creative returns.
The law of diminishing returns is an economic principle that states that the more energy put into an endeavor without alternating one’s strategy, the proportionally smaller results one gets. It’s where the old advice “work smarter, not harder” comes into play.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve found the law of diminishing returns to be true of creative writing as well. Once you hit a certain point, x amount of work no longer equals y amount of results. And when you reach that point, forcing yourself to keep working, even when doing so out of dedication to your purpose, is actually detrimental to your product.
I know myself and my work well enough by now to recognize when I'm about to hit that point. It’s just not worth churning out potentially second-rate writing in a bullheaded attempt to get more words down. All that really does is create more work for yourself on the back end, when you have to go back and fix your less-than-great writing.
So, in the end, I needn't have even asked about the safety of a late-night walk home, because I ended up coming back around 7:30 p.m.!
Back in my room, I took a bit of time to relax and unwind. I called my wife and kids and told them about my day. Just before I was about to go to sleep, however, I got a new idea for the scene I had been writing back at the restaurant. It wasn’t much, but it was one of those lines that just jumps into your head fully formed. I decided that I couldn’t risk waiting until morning. I wanted to remember it the way that it had come to me. So I cracked open my laptop to get it down, which led to a final short writing stint before turning in for the night.
Saturday, January 28
Time: 9:15 p.m.
Location: Harrisburg Historic District, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Word Count Total: 6,517
It was a wrap on Day 1 of my writer’s retreat. But just when I thought my day couldn't get any more interesting, one last surprise awaited me:
My bed had lights on it. Neato!
Something to hang your hat on
I woke up fairly early the next morning. Checkout wasn't until 11:00 a.m., but I didn't have any intentions of coming back to my room after I left for the day. My train left at 2:00 p.m., and I figured I would spend the day hopping from writing spot to writing spot, making my way slowly back toward the station.
There was just one complication. It was a Sunday, and a few quick Google searches the night before had revealed that a lot of the writing spots I’d planned to try out would be closed for the day.
The local library was closed. So were several of the promising coffee shops I’d scoped out. Fortunately, I found a listing online for a combination used bookstore and coffee shop that looked pretty cool, and it was open on Sundays. It was north of my location along the waterfront, so it would be a bit of a hike from my Airbnb, but it seemed like a promising start to the day.
I would soon discover that the warnings of my mother and high school teachers were correct: You can't trust everything you read on the internet.
I packed up my stuff and headed out, but not before signing the Airbnb’s door, as instructed.
Here's where I would like to show how weirdly narrow the alleyway was to get to the back door of the house. Oh, and I also found this little Richard Simmons chia pet.
Saturday had been sunny and unseasonably warm, but I wasn't lucky enough for a repeat. Sunday was truer to what one expects of winter in the Northeast. Cold. Windy. Overcast. In a word, bleak. Sweet home Pennsylvania. It was only about a one-mile walk to the address of the bookstore and coffee shop that had looked so cool online and was open on Sundays, but it felt a lot longer in the frigid cold with wind whipping in off the river. Even with winter gloves on, by the time I reached my destination, I couldn’t feel my fingers.
I turned the corner and found... nothing.
Not only did the cool-looking local bookstore and coffee shop not have Sunday hours after all, but it did not, in fact, appear to exist.
I double-checked my phone to make sure I had the right address and that it was a current listing. The business listing was active. I was in the right spot. Google even confidently claimed that the store was “Open Now.” As I stood there with my phone, scrolling with numb thumbs, I found a photo of the place I was looking for, complete with a quaint-looking signing hanging over an inviting storefront. In the non-digital world in front of my eyes, however, the same storefront sat empty. The business had either closed or moved to a new location. But apparently, the internet hadn’t gotten the memo. And consequently, neither had I.
I was now in Harrisburg’s Old Uptown Historic District, at least a mile from any other shops or stores, out in the cold, for no reason. I really didn't feel like taking any more risks on leads after getting burned once already. Not only would another dead end mean more wasted time, but it might sour my mood and make getting into the creative flow would be that much more difficult. So, even though it was over a mile away from me at this point — farther than I had already walked this morning — I decided to go somewhere I was certain at least existed, since I had already been there. And so, that is how I ended up back at Denim Coffee again, after a cold walk through the heart of Downtown.
Sunday, January 29
Time: 10:30 a.m.
Location: Denim Coffee, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (again)
Word Count Total: 8,980
I find that it always makes the day feel better after you get the first few words down. No matter what else happens the rest of the day, you have something to hang your hat on. You produced something. Even if it all ends for you tomorrow, those words will live on, on a hard drive somewhere or a pad of paper or a note on your phone. Maybe no one will ever read them. But they exist. Because you did it. That day, you did it. Maybe that’s why, after some progress was made at Denim Coffee, I felt emboldened enough to head back out and take a chance on looking for one of the other places I had seen online and thought might be a good writing spot.
Foraging
On the move again.
Have you noticed how much I was on the move during this short trip?
In my head, I had a different idea of how this would all go. I thought that finding a quiet place and just staying put all day, in one spot, would be the best strategy for me. All I needed was a place to sit and write, uninterrupted. And maybe a nice view. It’s the isolated cabin in the woods, the lodge in the mountains — that’s the aesthetic we’re looking for if we want to really get creative, right?
Well, that’s what I thought. But I was quickly finding out that location changes were having a positive correlation not only on my output but also on my overall work ethic.
I started to realize that if I monitored myself, I could feel, almost intuitively, when I had done all I could do in a given location and it was time to move on to the next spot. It was like I was a prehistoric hunter-gatherer, foraging for inspiration instead of sustenance. And perhaps, for a creator, inspiration is a form of sustenance.
This time, I went out in search of a specific coffee shop I’d learned about, taking North Third Street back past the State Capital complex again. But I never got to my intended destination.
Instead, partway there, I stumbled upon Midtown Scholar Bookstore.
How this place did not come up in my online searches for “coffee shops and bookstores in the Harrisburg area,” I will never understand.
When I spotted Midtown Scholar from a couple of blocks away, I think I actually said “WOW” out loud. It was almost noon on a Sunday in January, and at Midtown Scholar Bookstore: One of America’s Great Independent Bookstores, business was booming.
I'm the type of person who could literally spend an entire day, dawn to dusk, inside the average bookstore. But I'm pretty sure I could have spent several days back-to-back in this very above-average place. I walked in, and it was like I was home. The atmosphere is just awesome. It feels more like you’re in an old library than a bookstore, complete with rolling ladders, wrought iron fixtures — the works. Plus, there’s a coffee bar and open tables overlooking the first floor that are perfect writing spots.
Honestly, it was all I could do not to spend my entire time in Midtown Scholar just looking around, checking out the books, and likely leaving much poorer than I arrived. I later learned that this shop has been in operation for over twenty years and is consistently voted the best independent bookstore in the region. Again, how my online sleuthing led me to a store that did not exist, and NOT the best independent bookstore in the region, I’ll never know.
In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield warns of the dastardly influence of Resistance: the powerful, ethereal force that stands in the way of artists and creators and attempts to stop them from pursuing their life’s work. Well, Resistance was fighting me with weighted gloves. The temptation to become a consumer rather than a producer here was strong. I had to remind myself of the mission. This was a writing retreat, and I was there to write.
I got set up at one of Midtown Scholar’s upstairs tables, cracked open the old computer, and got to work.
I was there for about two hours, at which point I had just enough time to grab something to eat before catching my train back to Pittsburgh.
Sunday, January 29
Time: 12:50 p.m.
Location: Midtown Scholar Bookstore, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Word Count Total: 10,405
I mentioned earlier that 2,000 words (about eight standard industry-size pages) is a respectable goal as a daily fiction-writing output for me. Breaking the 10,000-word mark in just one and a half days felt pretty cool.
In the end, I couldn’t leave Midtown Scholar totally empty-handed. They have a selection of apparel modeled after vintage motivational posters encouraging kids to read, featuring characters from pop culture. I ended up buying two pairs of Star Wars-themed reading socks for my daughters (Yoda saying, “Read, you must,” and Darth Vader saying, “Read, it is your destiny). I also got myself a T-shirt featuring the galaxy’s most feared bounty hunter, Boba Fett, with the tagline “Read: A Bounty of Books Awaits.” (Side note: the Boba Fett shirt proved to be a major hit at my book signing at Fan Expo Comic Con in Cleveland later that year.)
I also left something behind at Midtown Scholar: a signed copy of one of my novels, Rust on the Allegheny. I left it at the table where I had spent the late morning writing. I wonder who picked it up and what became of it.
Home again, home again (jiggety jog)
Before heading to the station, I grabbed lunch at a little diner on my way to the train station. Roxy’s Café makes a mean omelet, and they aren’t stingy with the bacon, so if you’re ever in the area, stop by.
Soon, I was back at the train station, where I did a bit of reading while I waited to board.
By now, I was an old pro at riding the rails. “What’s that? Is this my first train ride? Oh, how adorable. No, actually. This is, in fact, my SECOND train ride, thank you very much.”
If anything, I found the ride home even more enjoyable. Again, I got down to work and started writing, and as the glaciated central Pennsylvania scenery rolled by and the sun took its seasonably early leave behind the hills, I once again found that being on the move invigorated my creative muscles.
I was working on some climactic moments in my novel, and I was so focused on the work during that train ride that I practically shut out the outside world. I had entered what some people refer to as “flow state.” When I was jarred from my self-induced hypnosis by the conductor informing us that we were on approach to the Pittsburgh station, I couldn’t believe how quickly the hours had flown by.
I closed my laptop. It was over.
Sunday, January 29
Time: 6:45 p.m.
Location: The Amtrak Pennsylvanian
Word Count Total: 15,829
There's something about solitary, independent pursuits that is strange and hard to describe.
Whether you've had a bad day with your creative work or a good one, the rest of the world doesn't know and isn’t any different for it.
When you reach a major personal milestone — when you hit a goal that only you know you made for yourself, one that no one else would even understand — there is this sense of quiet celebration. This feeling of internal satisfaction. Some of the purest victories are the ones the rest of the world knows nothing about it. They have no idea the mountain you just scaled, the odyssey you just completed. In the world around you, nothing has changed. Yet nothing will ever be the same.
You could choose to see a moment like this as a hollow victory, considering how life goes on and nothing is really any different, even after you’ve achieved this thing that means so much to you. But those of us who choose to make this our life don't see it that way. Creatives live for those solitary, independent pursuits and those soul-deep eternal victories.
Though I don't know for sure, I think there was probably a smile on my face as I walked back from Pittsburgh Union Station to the parking garage to prepare for my drive home. That said, my feeling of victory that day did not include any contentment or satisfaction with what I’d produced. And that’s the hard part.
I was buzzing from all that creative work I’d gotten done, but it was not a “mission accomplished” sort of feeling. Instead, I was so wrapped up in my fictional world that I was still thinking about the very line I had left off on, and brainstorming what the next line would be, what the scene after that would be like, where it would lead in the story, what my readers would think when they got to that place in the book, and how only I would ever know which parts of the story had been written on a train moving through central Pennsylvania, or in one of America's Great Independent Bookstores, or at a restaurant where somebody put sugar in the saltshakers, or in a bam, five-star Airbnb with a narrow alleyway and a Richard Simmons chia pet.
It's a little sad in hindsight, but I was experiencing the opposite of a sense of completion. Instead of “job done,” it was more like “good start, now keep it going.”
I had to fight the urge to open up my phone and dictate some words into it on my drive home that night. In fact, I was planning, as soon as I got home, to sit my stuff down, open my laptop, and try to cram in a few more words before heading to bed. I figured, hey, my wife and kids will be asleep anyway. It’s the perfect time to, what else? Write! I’m not making this up! That really was my honest-to-goodness plan — to pick up right where I’d left off and just keep plugging away as soon as I got in the house!
But the miles of walking in the cold that morning started to catch up with me somewhere around the Wexford exit, and by the time I got home, the only thing I wanted to do was go to sleep. So that is what I did, right after waking up my kids to say hello, thanking them again for my birthday present, and saying I couldn't wait to tell them all about it the next morning.
They loved their reading socks, by the way.
Do writer’s retreats work?
I want to stress again that I went into this trip unsure of whether a writing retreat would prove productive for me or not.
I thought the ideal situation would be that empty cabin scenario, deep in the woods, isolated, stationary, with nothing to distract you. But now, having been through a sort of nontraditional version of that experience, I think the empty cabin in the woods would be a little intimidating to me. There would be a lot of pressure to produce and a sense of failure if you couldn’t. My on-the-move, hunter-gatherer writing expedition, on the other hand, was a major success.
My 36-Hour Writing Retreat Word Count Total: 15,829
15,000 words written in less than two days is my new personal record for fiction, thanks to my solo writing retreat.
So, do writer’s retreats work? All I can really say is, this one worked for me, and I plan on taking more of them in the future. If nothing else, it’ll certainly keep things fresh.
How about you?
For the writers out there, have you ever taken a writing retreat-type trip of your own? It’s not a competition, but I’m curious, what’s your personal record for daily word count? And does word count matter at all, or is it more about quality over quantity?
Thanks for reading, and happy writing!
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Corey
P.S. The book I wrote on my writing retreat is coming out this year. Follow me to be the first to know when it comes out. I’d love to hear your guesses as to which scenes were written where!
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