This month I took time off work to have a creative retreat. No, not running from the enemy in a mesmerising zigzag pattern - but time dedicated to my creative projects. And in particular, my current main project: Anne of Green Cables, a cyberpunk reimagining of Anne of Green Gables. This newsletter will be part retrospective, part how-to, in case you are lucky enough to try this on your own.

I’m writing this after three-and-a-half weeks of retreat, with a little more to go.

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My previous experiences

In recent years I have taken time off to work on creative projects. Either a few weeks or up to a month. One of the first was to work on the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, where you assemble a roguelike game in seven days. After a few failed retreats for 7DRL, I moved onto other projects. When I returned to the interactive fiction community after a long absence, I worked primarily on my previous project: Hand Me Down. That was a sizable portion of 2023, all in all.

Prior to all this — when I fancied myself a novel writer — I went on residential writers retreats up in the Blue Mountains. There is a place called Varuna that is designed around having five writers take up residence for a week in a beautiful old house. Breakfast and lunch is provided, and a chef brings around dinner every night. You spend the day in silent, productive wrestling matches with the written word, and then congregate at night with the other writers to share stories or woes. Writers are fantastic at telling ghost stories.

What’s the big idea?

If you follow productivity pundits, the way to get a project done is work on it every day. Work on it regardless of the day, the weather, your feelings. Don’t break the chain. Discipline is better than enthusiasm. All that.

But there is a difference between being creative as a job, and doing it as a hobby. Of course, you can just take on the hobby as a second job, but now you have two jobs problems. While one shouldn’t just work on creative projects when the muses sing, it’s no use grinding yourself into a paste.

I feel that creative projects have a certain granularity to the problems you have to solve to bring them to life. If you’re doing your take on an established genre, be it writing a potboiler vampire harem novel, or a tweak on the Vampire Hunters game, much of the work lines up already for you, and you just need to do it and bash it into shape. Other creative projects might be more chunky and require you to break new ground, either for yourself or for the world. It may take time, energy and experience to crack the problems you need in order to do what you want your project to achieve.

Taking time off work to pursue creative projects is good for both types of project. Having a dedicated amount of time to churn out content can give you the confidence to continue after the retreat now that you have a solid base to work on. Alternatively, you might need the space to grapple with a problem and crack it, without the constraints and distractions of everyday life.

My project is somewhere in the middle. There were a few things that are just plain writing. Other things I needed time to figure out, learn, and experiment with. This included addressing the entire plot as a story, and the role of interactivity in the project.

Respecting the time

Say you’ve given yourself four weeks of creative retreat. That’s a lot of time. That’s a month, a chewable chunk of a year.

You want to give this retreat your best. You also don’t want to return from it a dessicated husk, so you need to pace yourself.

One trick with pacing is balancing time with life. If you have four weeks, you are encouraged to take some time to fart about or take some dedicated relaxation time. The problem is when that starts subsuming all your time. Having weeks of free time is great to catch up with the people you should have been catching up with, but I found I needed to be careful that I didn’t do too much of this. A one-hour lunch can balloon to three or four hours with travel time and time needed to get back into the project.

Another trap to watch out for is investing too much time. With time and space to work on something, you can be tempted into overinvesting into things you probably shouldn’t. For example, polishing a new prototype. Or going overboard with writing backstories. Or overengineering something that has every right to be janky. The tricky tail on this is that it really feels like progress, but it’s just work.

I found it invaluable to find the time to have lunch with friends and talk about the retreat. Having to explain this personal luxury I was undertaking helped solidify my plans and reinforce the value of it. I had a good session with friend of the newsletter and game designer Mike Purcell where we talked game prototypes. The ideas I got out of that was well worth the time investment. But similarly, I wouldn’t want to do that too much. Once you have seeds of ideas you actually have to plant them.

I spent a morning installing some old hard drives in my desktop, which had very little to do with Anne of Green Cables. But it was a task that had been hanging over my shoulder for months, and resolving it lightened my mental burden just a little bit. Spending a subsequent morning debugging RAID 1 shenanigans was not a good use of time. I tried to pull the ripcord on that quickly — discard the maybe broken drive, reinstall the other as a normal drive and continue on my way, as if this solution was the one I meant to do the whole time.

Resilience

With a long enough retreat, there’s scope for disasters. Last year I had a short retreat that was dashed through with looking after sick children. While I never regret looking after my children (why would you?) it was nonetheless sad to have a creative opportunity fall through your fingers. This retreat had a similar bout of sick kids, but I was a little better at dealing with it. Less regret, and more “I know we are binge-watching The Wiggles together, but you can’t stop me thinking about my project!”

And sometimes the disasters come from within the project itself. Maybe you realise the tech just can’t work. I had that last year with my three-part, multi-platform game that couldn’t be smoothly connected without a monumental amount of engineering. It took a while to accept the loss, but then I moved on with what I could. And I did okay in the end.

I think it’s good to have a rough plan for any creative retreat, but in the apocryphal words of Mike Tyson, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Be empowered to change direction, abandon ideas or jet off in crazy new directions.

Having a small amount of structure in your retreat can even help if you have to adapt. Blocking out days to solve a problem gives you a way to put barriers around chasing a sunk cost fallacy. Starting your morning’s work with a pomodoro timer enables you to just work on something today, just this morning, which might accidentally turn into a productive day.

Realism

In preparing for this newsletter, I tried journalling my retrospective on the retreat so far. The newsletter comes at the end of the month which has good retrospective vibes. My retreat actually goes for another week. This is a lucky alignment because I can review the work I have done and realign what I want to do for the final stretch.

But I had felt that I hadn’t achieved much. I have a bit of a minigame prototype, some scratchings on a plot, and no actual text written. This was the feeling, coming from accounting all the distractions. But you need to account for everything.

The more faithful accounting looks like this:

• I organized my code and art early, following from previous experience.

• I researched and wrote prototypes in Twine, proving that I could do a few key things in Sugarcube that I would want to do. This avoids falling into an analogue of the technical problem I had with Hand Me Down, and also highlighting very early in the project that I needed to move away from Harlowe. Avoiding wasted effort is progress!

• I learned Javascript and the p5js to make Twine do what I needed, as well as prototype a minigame.

  

• I solved a problem I had with the ending, as well as a general problem of trying to write an interactive story, rather than just a story with interactive bits in it.

• I started work on art assets. While some of this did not work (I spent a day trying to make some title art in Blender), this at least tested the mettle of some of my art ideas. Short-term failures can sometimes be long-term successes.

• In brainstorming some of the themes of the game, I came across a rich vein of inspiration for entities in the work. Ideas that were a bit disparate before my retreat are nicely woven together now.

• I did a deep dive on prior art and alternative takes on Anne. This gave me a better understanding of where my work might stand.

Truthfully I now feel like there’s been a bunch of work done, but it’s not all obvious progress. It’s a lot of support work, problem-solving and preparation. While I was prepared to just fly by the seat of my pants, having this solid structure around my work is encouraging.

In doing these sorts of retrospectives, I’ve found it’s useful to state a lot of this out loud, either to friends or to oneself, and being open to honestly challenging your assumptions. Sometimes the discussion with friends will provide sufficient challenge, but other times you might just need to be your own stern-but-fair editor. I often err by being more stern than fair, but over time I’m improving.

Summary

If you can gift yourself the time, space and energy for a creative retreat, do it. Establish some structure, but not too much. Allow yourself space to fail, but not too much. Give yourself to the work, but not too much.

And overally be honest with yourself and your work.

So if a day calls for you to sit in the sunshine and nap, then just do it. I did, and it was fabulous.

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