Writing your article in 12 weeks

Well, I finished reading it in that time, but I didn’t finish working through it.

Laura Belcher is brilliant – if you do most of what she says.

Why most? Because I have one reservation. Not that her book Writing your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks isn’t hugely helpful. It is. Anyone who thinks it’s “too self-helpy” would do well to read it. Belcher is very comprehensive and astute about what you need to do to get that languishing draft back to life. She breaks down every step, from your drawer to the editor’s desk, into tiny movements. She chivvies you along to make sure you get it done. And you can download forms from Belcher’s website if you want to use the book again and again, which many do.

My reservation is the US-centricity. My hackles raised when Belcher suggested changing to a more Anglo-sounding name to get published. Yes, there’s racism in publishing and it’s a violent phenomenon. But changing names to sway gatekeepers is not a solution. I was also surprised by her recommendation to always go for the best US journal, though a couple of European ones might be better. If you live and work elsewhere, or your name sounds like you do, you might want to take this US-centrism with a very large pinch of salt.

Belcher is at her best asking awkward questions to make sure you have your argument and structure right. She focuses on overall flow as well as fine detail. If you can’t get hold of her book, or lug it around when working through it, you’d do well to download her checklists. LINK

I worked through this book with the Kirjoitetaan… Facebook group and during my own Write on Wednesday Zoom sessions. It’s my fault that I got behind schedule – I didn’t use every Wednesday for this project for 12 weeks and had to catch up on my next writing retreats. But I made my own deadline at the end of November.

One terrifyingly prolific academic I know said she wrote her best ever article by following Belcher to the letter. I just submitted mine – but I can’t give my opinion on it till I know what the journal editors think. If they don’t like it all, luckily Belcher has a whole chapter on how to revise and resubmit.

I’m planning to facilitate another 12 weeks of working through Belcher’s book to get an article written in the new year, with Tohtoriverkosto. Hop on my mailing list if you want to join us!

new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit

Violent Phenomena

Violent Phenomena (eds. Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang, Tilted Axis 2022) rolls the south and east of the globe to the top. 21 essays address racism in the publishing industry in general and literary translation in particular:

If you’re dual heritage, or mixed, or more, these essays will resonate. It’s time to get over monolingual nationalism and the naive idea that most people have just one “mother” tongue. Most people don’t. How can a translator build a bridge between two linguistic islands when she has several languages jostling in the city inside her? Gitanjali Patel and Nariman Youssef remind us that “our mother’s tongue may be different to our father’s and it’s possible that we know neither”. They continue, “I can’t imagine that many of the white translators I know feel the same debt to the source language, the same desire to do it justice… from my own experience of having my English(es) mocked, disparaged, invaded… I do not want to reenact that violence on another language.”

“Western poets building bridges to where they don’t belong”. Mona Kareem decries the practice of “co-translation” based on a “literal draft” for someone who doesn’t speak the source language. “World literature is no Lonely Planet” says Lúcia Collischonn in her essay. But translation can inform and expand the target language. It can decolonize.

The essayists expose structural racism in publishing. We need to get away from “the mythical English reader” who, as Anton Hur worked out his publishers meant, is white. Despite the risks, Kaiama L. Glover translated Depestre’s Hadriana for Afro-anglophone audiences. The “extravagant ludic register” of the Francophone Haitan poet was too much for many publishers. She is not alone. “When I began translating from Telugu, I ran into a major difficulty: a clash of literary cultures” says Madhu H. Kaza. US publishers kept saying the work was “not a good fit for us”. Sandra Tamele had to translate Ammaniti’s Io non ho paura into European (not Mozambican) Portuguese, so people could read her translation across Lusophone Africa.

Should a white translator even be writing this? I know I have more work to do. But I wanted to hug Eluned Gramich, the author of the Welsh chapter and yell, “yes!” She describes a violent phenomenon I grew up in. The Welsh language is on the margins of its own turf, but Welsh people were complicit in the expansion of empire. Did you know some Welsh speakers prefer to talk of Y Deyrnas Gyfunol, the combined kingdom (not “united”)? Gramich cites the immortal R. S. Thomas:

“Speak up is, of course

The command to speak English.”

In her amazing essay-as-snake, Ayesha Manazir Siddiqui shows that translator-intermediaries can be “part of the colonial project”. If the play was not about, but for, Birmingham Pakistani Muslims, her translation of it would be different. As she asks:

“Who is doing the translation, and for whom?” The author and the audience need their say.

Sometimes the best choice is not to translate, but to tell the story right within its community.

Or to choose a language closer to home. Translate a poetry performance on Bali into BISINDO (Indonesian sign language) for the locals, not Auslan (Australian sign language) for the tourists. Khairani Barokka is clear on the “right to access, right of refusal: translation of/as absence, sanctuary, weapon”.

Or to provincialize the “big” language by translating into it out of the “small” language. “I often ached to hear the sound of my life in this language” said Yogesh Maitreya on translating into English out of Marathi.

Or to find autonomy in orality, like Kashimiri translator Onaiza Drabui. When there’s no word for novel in your language, you could start with “verse, sung not written; dramatized folklore, performed not read.”

Or to decide to publish a bilingual translation that is “plainly a faithless act” because the poems don’t match. Hamid Roslan does this with Singlish and without paratexts in parsetreeforestfire.

M NourbeSe Philip knows that “those involved… believe that they can best bestow meaning, their meaning, on the work”. As she said on discovering that her Zong! Had been translated into Italian without her consent: “If you are lucky enough to pick a living poet to translate, write to him or her. Get to know the person; ask him or her questions.”

Yes, translators, publishers and writers do this often. But not often enough. We could all ask more before we start to bestow meaning.

new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit

Where do you want to write next?

October is busy. If you do half term or have an autumn break, you are going to need it. Everybody you said you’d do something for wants it now. All the things you signed up for are suddenly happening. And those “by the end of the year” deadlines start looming on the horizon like little stormclouds. But they will get closer. You still need to write. And you can find the time, together.

I found writing that paragraph therapeutic. Here are some places to help you write.

Checking in online could be enough. The Facebook group “I’m writing though I don’t have time” (for Finnish academics) is fantastic. Every workday you can pop in and say what you’re writing.

You might want company online and you’ve got a few more hours, or even a day. Tohtoriverkosto’s next online writing retreat in Finnish is on 25 November. There’s still a couple of places left. This is the fourth time we are writing together, and the group is great. If you’re doing or have a PhD and speak Finnish, you should join the network!

If you’ve got a day, you might need to get offline and into a different space. One of the loveliest places to do that is Kirjailijatalo, the Writers’ House in Jyväskylä. And our next day retreat there is on 18 November. If you don’t live locally, come up the night before or stay the night after, we’d love to have you. Get a feel for previous writing retreats at Kirjailijatalo (pictured above) to help you decide.

When you need two whole days to get your teeth into a project you’ve been putting off. A bit of luxury can make that easier, and your favourite venue so far for that is Valo Hotel & Work Helsinki (where we wrote in August and we loved the spa!). We are back at Valo on 1 and 2 December. Come for one day or both.

All my writing retreats are bilingual, in Finnish and English (unless a group wants one language). But of course you can write in any language you like. At any retreat, people are usually writing in half a dozen. There are some scholarships so every writer can come; if you need one, or have any other questions let me know.

If you can’t make those dates, we are still writing every Wednesday morning on Zoom. And we are planning to write again at Säynätsalo Town Hall in the new year. Join our mailing list and you’ll be the first to hear about it…

new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit

Writing round the table

Helsinki’s poetry moon festival, Runokuu, is in the last week of August. I spent it with a dozen colleagues, translating Finnish poems and listening to some of the poets. That was the perfect way to mark ten years of living in Finland. As I’d hoped, the poetry translation workshop made me think hard about a challenging kind of writing.

Words whirled through my head all week, so that by Sunday dinner I was even dissecting the restaurant name on the receipt. My stomach is still settling, so I can’t tell you everything I learned around the table last week, but I can tell you the menu.

Starters

Get the mezze.

Share. If there’s some strange shellfish in there, watch how others prise them open. If you’re not sure how to tackle those claws, ask. If you’ve made that sauce before, say what spices you used. Try a bit of everything.

Mains

Pick one.

Stop eyeing your neighbour’s plate, it’s probably no better than yours, even if it looks prettier. Even if it is tastier, they chose it, let them enjoy it. You don’t have to switch dishes or split the last fragment. Yours might be a bit boring, but stick with it. Eat it up.

Desserts

Choose your favourite.

See how this restaurant cooks that classic. You’ve eaten a thousand tiramisus and a million vanilla ice creams. The memories of them resurface on your tongue. Is this one the perfect balance – or bland? Does it look as weird as it sounded on the menu?

Coffee

Sit.

Sip that espresso.

Let that herbal tea infuse before you pour it into others’ cups.

Digest.

Back in your kitchen

Recreate the recipe.

Follow it to the letter and see what happens. If you forget the pepper, is it edible? If you haven’t got all the veg, what can you use instead? Make it again from memory. Ask a foodie friend to taste it. Invite a whole load of people over and make a vast vat of it.

A huge thank you to FILI – the Finnish Literature Exchange – for organising the poetry translation workshop and to Michal Švec for leading it. Thank you to the three poets who shared their work with us: Sinikka Vuola, Susinukke Kosola, and Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen. Friends who workshopped with me, as we get back to our own kitchens, let’s keep swapping recipes.

new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit

Same here

For Women in Translation Month, I’d like to remember a woman translator I missed by a whisker, and share her thoughts on writing.

Tarja Roinila was a prolific, much-loved, and much-awarded translator into Finnish. She died in 2020, aged just 56. She’d been translating prose, poetry and philosophy, from French, German and Spanish, for half her life. And teaching others to do the same. I loved her translations of Bernardo Atxaga and wish I’d met her – friends and colleagues still miss her deeply. One of them, Mika Kukkonen, has edited her collected essays, unpublished pieces, and translator’s notes. The book, Samat Sanat (Teos 2022) is so popular, I could only get it from the library on a short loan. Now I’ve read it, I’ve bought it, because I’ll want to come back to it.

Samat sanat means “the same words,” but it also is what you say when you wish someone the same – “you too” – or share their experience – “same here.” Those overlapping meanings fit this book. Roinila shows that translation is writing the same text again, here, in your language, for you too, where you are. It’s different and also the same, like pain and Brot taste different, look different, belong in their culture a bit differently, but are both bread. In French you’d think of a wheat baguette first, and in German, a slice of dark bread, like rye – but both make good sandwiches.

Still, even if you write exactly the same text again, it resonates in a different time and place (see Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, which Roinila discusses at length). Translators write across that gap in time and place – and language. Here and there are not the same. But there are ways to bridge the gap.

Roinila could go through eleven revisions before she let her text go. She relaxed into her work only when she had a first draft and could start writing in Finnish, guided by its grammar and syntax, sounds and creativity. Her 2018 translation diary reminded me a lot of Daniel Hahn’s 2022 one, Catching Fire. But what I enjoyed most was her conversation with Coral Bracho, the Mexican poet who Roinila had translated 17 years before and then came back to. She pestered Bracho with questions about what this word means or how that phrase resonates, until Bracho despaired:

“Write it like it is!”

Same here.

I agree that’s the aim. And I can feel that frustration. You too? Of course it is not easy, but it is possible. Roinila shows you how. She emphasizes the affective and embodied way of writing it like it is, rather than the cognitive. She’s not trying to transfer a Platonic abstract idea, but like Sappho, to show how a text feels, sounds, works. I loved her hat-tip to Kristiina Drews’ translation of Ali Smith’s There but for the.

Roinila not so interested in the writer’s process or past or public profile, but in getting inside what they write. For her it’s playful, it’s a lot of fun. It’s also collegial – she talks about finding solutions together. If I was brave enough, I’d translate Samat Sanat into English. But I’ve given you a taste. Teos, can we write Roinila like she is in English, too?

Get back to writing

Summer stretches gloriously before us. If you’re in Finland, the holidays are well underway. You won’t expect to hear from your colleagues again for the rest of this month. And if you’re elsewhere in Europe, you still have time to get yourself to Helsinki for 18 and 19 August.

Why come to Helsinki?

To join us at Valo Hotel & Work Helsinki for two days writing.

Writers recommended this venue because the coworking space is flexible, light and spacious. And it has everything you want from a hotel: great food, green key sustainable status, and a fabulous rooftop spa. If you’re local, join us for the day, but stay over to immerse yourself in your project – and the pool.

Why an in-person writing retreat?

Online works great for many. I love the online writing retreats I do. But not everyone has a room of their own to write in undisturbed. Even if you have one, writing in companionable silence in the same room and chatting in the breaks can work wonders. Have someone else take care of all the logistics – meals, breaks, enough time for rest and exercise. For just 48 hours, let the people back home or in the office take care of the rest. In the last couple of years, we’ve missed this. We need it. It works.

Why 18 and 19 August?

Because by that point, if you’ve set any writing goals for the summer, I bet you will feel you’re running out of time. 1 September is that “back to school” date in a lot of places. Schools will be back by mid-August in Finland, but universities won’t – yet. We all need proper time off from our writing, and from reading anything related to it. We need to plan that rest in. But it might be easier to switch off if you know when you’re going to turn your writer’s lights back on. Being in a dedicated space with others who have made the same time commitment can help you get back to writing.

Why book this writing retreat now?

Having this date in my diary has already helped me clear the decks for summer. Insanely, I have three book chapters on the go. This is my own fault but I can cope, by writing together little and often. I host weekly online cowriting sessions for anyone who’s been on my retreats. They keep me – us – going. Members of our group have turned from faces on Zoom to close friends. But sometimes you need more than an hour at a time to check in and work through a tricky patch in a particular text. It helps to have two whole days in the diary well in advance. Two days only for writing. Nothing else.

It’d be a pleasure to write with you.

Book here.

All photos are my own, from my test run of Valo Hotel & Work this spring. You can see why I’m looking forward to going back!

Pitch your book

You have a great idea for a book, you’ve begun writing it, you’re sure your readers will appreciate it. You only have to convince a publisher.

Where on earth do you start?

I’m going to talk about non-fiction here, particularly about creative non-fiction. That means bringing ideas out of academia to a wider readership. I’ll mention fiction and the US, but focus on the UK, where I grew up, and Finland, where I live. That narrows it down a lot, but a big part of convincing a publisher to take your book is just that – narrowing things down.

Narrow it down

Big UK academic publishers get so many requests that they have a standard form to fill in. (here are the book proposal guidelines for Routledge, Palgrave, and Brill). They ask questions that will help you focus your book proposal. In a nutshell:

Who is writing it, and who is going to read it?

Where are the writer(s) and the readers?

When will you finish your manuscript?

How does your book fit with others?

Why do we need this book at all?

What is it about?

Recently one of those big publishers accepted our book proposal. With two co-editors we have our contract signed. Several authors have chapters drafted, and we have a realistic schedule. Now all we have to do is finish writing the book! I’ve edited and translated several proposals – and books – written by others, so I knew about that stage. But before going through it myself, I did not know how to contact a publisher, get them to consider your proposal, and negotiate a contract. It’s a lot more work than you think.

We were negotiating our contract when I attended two very different sessions on how to pitch a book. One was with academic author and editor Laura Portwood-Stacer in the US – if you don’t get her Manuscript Works newsletter already, you should! The other was a two-parter with the PhD network in Finland, Tohtoriverkosto. First we met a successful author, Tiina Raevaara, and then Ville Rauvola from a big publisher, Atena. At these events, I realized how much I know already about getting published – and how much more there is to learn.

Find where you fit in

One of the first things you need to do is see what’s out there already, and where you fit in. Read a lot, and well beyond your comfort zone. Read in other languages too, Rauvola suggests – you might get a great idea that would work in your first language. Go to book fairs. Seeing all those books and their authors in one place is exciting. Behind the scenes, there’s a lot of hard bargaining. You need to explain how your book stands out from all the others, to some very busy people – that elevator pitch.

The Helsinki Book Fair, where I’ve been twice with the FILI programme for translators, opened my eyes to how people buy and sell books. We had meetings with literary agents who handle the rights. This made me see the commercial side of publishing. Who is going to pay for your book? How are they going to market it to readers? I translate samples for literary agents I’ve met through FILI, and write readers’ reports for New Books in German. NBG’s advice on how to write a good readers’ report tells you what publishers are looking for.

Book fairs are where publishers literally set out their stalls, so you can get a good feel for what they like. The Finnish Publishers Association lists its members online. The UK Publishers Association has a searchable directory. Of course in a specialist niche, whoever publishes your literature might publish you.

Approach a publisher

In Finland things are much less formalized than in the UK. People tend to know of each other, at least. Rather than six degrees of separation, it’s more like two or three. But in the US, Portwood-Stacer also says to start with informal chats and use your connections if you have them. You need to check out the publishers too before you make a formal submission. Not everyone can fire off a two-line email saying “I’ve had an idea for another book, what do you think?” Raevaara does this for her narrative non-fiction books, but she’s a respected scientist and creative writer.

If you don’t have quite that star status yet, you might need to say a little more. To get a publisher interested you need to know your likely readership. The consensus seems to be that email is best, but only to the right person. This can mean digging round publisher websites to find out who handles that genre and field. You don’t need to send the whole manuscript – you should contact them long before it’s ready. A page (no more than two) answering those wh- questions will narrow down why they should care about your book now.

Smaller publishers have a more personal touch and may respond faster. Even if they like your idea, an academic book proposal will go through peer review, so it can take a while.

Make your proposal

Different parts of your book proposal are important for different people, says Portwood-Stacer. The working title shows the editor the key point you want to make. The project description shows how you write. The intended audiences and comparable books are important for sales and marketing staff. The synopsis and chapter summaries are important for peer reviewers. Both these groups want to know who the authors are so they can place you. The specifications (length, images, etc.) are important for production planning.

Get beta readers to offer you constructive feedback. If you’re popularizing a thesis, you need to explain concepts in language that more general readers can follow. Revise is the book to help you do that. Raevaara herself is fantastic at turning hard science into thrillers. With Urpu Strellman, she’s written the Tietokirjailijan kirja, the book for non-fiction writers in Finnish. She cited Johanna Laitinen from another big publisher, Gummerus: “I always want a book proposal to surprise me.”

Publishers like to see that you are active on social media and can promote your work. You can do this in different ways, to suit you (it doesn’t have to be Twitter!), but they will want to know how you share your ideas.

Negotiate a contract

Getting a contract is fantastic – but scrutinize it before you sign. Authors’ associations can help you make sure that the terms are fair. In the UK, the Society of Authors offers a fantastic contract vetting service. They were extremely helpful for our book, identifying in every clause what was usual, realistic, and acceptable (not the same thing!). The US Authors’ Guild offers an excellent model contract for literary translation. The Finnish Union of Writers and the non-fiction writers’ association publish model contracts. In Finland, Sanasto makes sure your get your royalties and defends your copyright. In the UK, ACLS does the same.

Get it written

When our book proposal became a book contract, the first thing we did was pencil in writing retreats. This could be informal cowriting hours online with a couple of colleagues, or days offline, away from everything else. If you want to stick to your schedule, write little and often.

new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit

Revise!

“Revise and resubmit” are three words that fill academic writers with dread. My own PhD wasn’t ready when I submitted it first. Second time round, it was, because what was on the page more closely matched what was in my head. Two decades later, I remember how that process of reworking feels. Now, editing and translating, I reshape other people’s academic texts for a living. Revising your own is always harder.

This book helps. Reading Pamela Haag’s Revise: The Scholar-Writer’s Essential Guide to Tweaking, Editing, and Perfecting your Manuscript (Yale UP 2021), I found myself crowing in delighted recognition. Like mine, her mantra is “who is doing what to whom?” If a passage is in the passive, it might not be clear in the reader’s mind – or even the writer’s head. A developmental editor like Haag can help you restructure. But you can do a lot to your manuscript yourself by asking the same questions.

You can use this book to turn the vague writing feedback into concrete action. What does it actually mean to “smooth over” or “tighten up” a text for better “flow”? Turn lists into linked text, take out subheadings, shorten chapter titles (stop before that colon!), or cut examples and block quotes. Check your verb, subject, and object are clear. Humans do things to other people or things. Who or what are they? “Policymakers” or “citizens” are still large categories that you need to define. You can make a watchlist of words you overuse (“interesting” and “clearly” are on mine).

Moving through the text is another huge issue. Ideally, “your manuscript’s inner logic makes its explicit articulation unnecessary.” Haag spends a lot of time on making segues, or transitions, effective. She gets her red pen out for “traffic direction” or “hand-holding” (“As I said in section 1, I will next…”) and “emcee words” (“its devastating impact shocked us”). She advises against restating your argument too often and for techniques more used in narrative. Tell the reader what they need to know, in the order they need it. Right down to the sentence level.

Haag makes all this easier by defining terms. She is precise – do you need rhetorical questions? No. And figurative – is your manuscript a “sleek jaguar with no bones”? If it sounds good but has no skeleton to hold it together, you need to choose one, based on your main point. Then you can “walk down the vertebra” of the book to check they’re in place. “Tofu syndrome” means you’re writing like your sources, as tofu absorbs any flavour. I see this often in writing about the European Union, in fluent EU-speak. Like “asparagus” you can feel the point where a section should snap off so you don’t have to eat the long woody stalk. Scare quotes are an “eye roll” on the page, so it is more effective to tell us what is wrong with “that term.”

Blocks in your writing might have underlying “psycho-editorial” causes, which Haag lays out. If claims don’t sound confident you may not be feeling confident. You might use jargon to avoid making your own argument, or put conclusions first because you’re tired. Did you only put that long literature review in because someone else said you had to? If you know why, you can do something about it. “Force yourself to put the theory into your own words.”

Haag illustrates every point with real text she’s revised, and ends with a comprehensive checklist. Have you read your text aloud, checked that figurative language obeys the laws of nature (begone, actors mapping interwoven frameworks!), and made your antecedents clear (shown what “it” is)?

A colleague recommended Revise to me. Now I am recommending it to you. In the days after reading it, I found myself remembering Haag’s prompts, as if she was revising my writing alongside me. I made better decisions. It was easier to untangle those knotty sentences. Next time I have a big, shapeless text that needs trimming, I will start from her checklist.

new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit

101 ways to write

Sometimes imposing restrictions on your writing can be freeing. Translators know about this. We turn other people’s words into new ones in a different language that doesn’t work the same way. To quote Ginger Rogers, we do everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards, in heels.

If you want to ginger up your writing, get your hands on this book. But since 101 tapaa tappaa aviomies is in Finnish, I’ll focus here on the contents and how you might like to use them.

Laura Lindstedt and Sinikka Vuola take a violent story and retell it, 101 ways. It’s not long, so here’s my 20-word tweet-length version:

Anja, after years of abuse by her husband, kills him. The court concludes she’s served her sentence already. She’s free.

You could take that, and turn it into a haiku, a blurb, or an academic abstract. You’d be getting the idea. But what if you turned it into a libretto, a list of pharmacy prescriptions, or retold it from the point of view of the gun? It could be far more interesting to read.

What if you didn’t use the letter “e” at all, or replaced all the nouns with the ones three lines below them in the dictionary? Some people will enjoy these experiments with form more than others. You could try a tanka, limerick, or sonnet. I particularly enjoyed the traditional Finnish forms that echoed the Kantaletar.

What if Fibonacci, Kafka, or Getrude Stein got their teeth into it? Can you make your writing count/sound like theirs? Often, we have to write within some formal constraints – those abstracts and tweets – but applying all kinds of others is delightful.

Yes, some seem daft. But I did squeal with delight on several pages. It’s not a little up itself, sometimes. But grand old wordsmiths say, “if you’re stuck, try changing the person or tense.” What if you changed a lot more, playing with your text to see where it takes you?

Three new words for forms of writing I learned from this book were:

  1. Rapukäännös = crabwise turn = retroversio. In this context, telling the story backwards.
  2. Flarf = deliberately “bad” poetry made by scavenging odd search terms and bits of text online.
  3. Tautogram = a text where all the words start with the same letter.

Writing backwards in heels like that for a bit could make it easier for you to write forwards, barefoot. When your tired text hits snooze again, give it an extra blanket, a dreamcatcher – or a triple espresso. And see what happens.

new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit

Spring into Writing 2022: join us on retreat!

The days are getting longer. The clocks will soon change. Our Wednesday writing group finds the sun rising earlier means we’re waking up earlier. Does that give us more time to write?

Finally being back on campus or in the office has been brilliant for meeting in person again. But that means more time getting from A to B. A good thing, but the working day can feel longer.

If you’re struggling to fit it all in, carve out some writing time with us. Put your out-of-office on, get back into some good writing habits to start your summer project – and finish in time to take a proper holiday!

We’ve retreats to suit everyone: in person and online, in English and Finnish bilingual, and Finnish only, in April, May, and June. Come and try it for a day, or book yourself in for all five…

Online in April

Join us in April for two online retreat days, on Thursday 21 and Friday 22 (book here). While these are on Zoom, I’m taking the opportunity to test a new potential venue in Helsinki, Valo Work. So let me know if you want to meet up there.

On an island in May

In May, two days in person on Thursday 5 and Friday 6 (sign up here). After our successful retreat in February, we are returning to Säynätsalo Town Hall. This unique Alvar Aalto building is the perfect fit for us, quiet, spacious, and creative. The island is a bus ride from Jyväskylä city centre, in a beautiful setting on Päijänne, the second-biggest lake in Finland. Last time we saw the Northern Lights and tramped through the snow – this time, spring will be in the air! Book accommodation here now, as spaces are limited.

Suomeksi kesäkuussa

Our fourth online retreat in Finnish with Tohtoriverkosto is on Friday 17 June. Sign up here, it’s free to the PhD network members so do join if you haven’t yet. This is the week before midsummer, when Finns disappear into the forests and onto the lakes. But we will keep writing on Wednesdays for some of that time. Wednesday morning online sessions are free and open to every writer who has been on a retreat.

Scholarships

Every retreat has a free space for a student or person on a low income. Thanks again to the individuals and university departments who have sponsored this before. Email me for the scholarship code, or if you want to sponsor a scholar. Looking forward to writing with you!

Writers in community

One of the best things about writing together is how much you can learn from others. Here are some tips from writers on recent retreats:

1. Try writing the first sentence of each paragraph – fill in the detail later

2. Put your phone behind your computer screen out of sight – or turn it off!

3. Stick to one way of writing for one hour: brainstorming, free writing, revising…

4. If killing your darlings feels too brutal, send them to kindergarten/boarding school. (Instead of deleting text, move it to a separate document)

5. Change position – move to a different chair, sit then stand

6. To counteract hunching, lie on a cushion or foam roller so your chest is out

7. Measure yourself – how many words did you write in the last hour? Use that figure to schedule writing the whole piece

8. Let your text rest so it feels new when you come back to it

9. When you revise, try doing it in a different format, font, programme, or place

10. End with something physical, offline – walk, swim, meet to eat or for coffee

Every retreat, I’m amazed at how much we learn from each other, how much we get done, and how much fun we have. Come and write with us.

Thank you to Zama Ferin for her gorgeous photos from our February retreat in Säynätsalo.