Wouldn’t it be nice to leave all your worries behind for a month or two and have all the time you need to write? You could find a secluded place to stay like a guesthouse somewhere in the country, where no one can find you and no problems can reach you.

A writing retreat is a vision both beautiful and romantic. But most likely it won’t happen anytime soon. A couple of months isn’t realistic; a couple of days is not enough.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t design your own writing retreat. Right where you live.

The reason why writing retreats are such an alluring concept is because they work so well. And they work so well because you go there with one specific task in mind. You know why you’re there, and you know there’s a time limit. You adopt a posture and get things done. The alternative would be to spend a month at a writing retreat without getting anything done and look foolish.

You can have many if not most of the benefits of a writing retreat at home if you put some thought into it.

A retreat is a place you go to do a specific thing and nothing else. The moment you’re done, you leave.

Your retreat can be a corner of the house, a table, a comfy chair, a desk, or a bean bag. It doesn’t matter. It’s all ritual. That means you could make your laptop a writing retreat as long as you don’t do anything else on that laptop. No movies, games, no social media, only writing.

Stick with your writing retreat for two or three weeks, and your brain will come to associate the place or the thing with the task of writing. Instead of wondering what it should be doing, it will know, merely because you sat in that chair, that it is time to write.

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