Notes From My First Writing Residency

I spent six weeks at a residency in the woods (fictional, but the cabins exist somewhere). Six weeks, one cabin and very little internet. I arrived with a half-finished draft, a suitcase full of sweaters and a vague fear that I would spend the whole time staring at trees. I left with two hundred new pages, a notebook full of ideas and friendships I still treasure. I wrote more there than in the six months before. These are my notes from that strange, quiet, wonderful stretch of time, for anyone thinking of applying to a residency or simply wondering what happens in one.

The residency was in the hills of western North Carolina, at the end of a gravel road that my rental car did not enjoy. Twelve artists were there at a time, each with a small cabin. There was a main house for meals, a library with a woodstove and miles of trails through the forest. That was it. That was everything.

Arriving

My cabin had a desk under a window, a narrow bed, a bookshelf, a kettle and a porch with two chairs facing the trees. On the first afternoon, I unpacked, set up my laptop and sat down to write. Nothing happened. I was too aware of the silence, too conscious of the time, and too worried about wasting it. I made tea, walked a trail and went to bed early, convinced I had made a mistake.

The second day was a little better. By the end of the first week, something had shifted. The quiet stopped feeling like pressure and started feeling like space. I had nowhere to be, no email to answer and no reason to stop writing except hunger and sleep.

No internet

The cabin had one bar of signal near the woodpile. I stopped checking.

For the first few days, I walked to the woodpile every few hours, held my phone in the air and waited for messages to trickle in. It was ridiculous, and I knew it. By the end of the first week, I was checking once a day, at lunch. By the third week, I left my phone in a drawer for days at a time. My family knew how to reach the main house in an emergency, and nobody needed me urgently.

The change in my attention was remarkable. Without the constant small interruptions, my mind could stay with a scene for hours. I noticed things I usually miss: the way the light shifted on the desk, the sound of rain on the roof, the exact moment a sentence clicked into place. I also noticed how often, back home, I reached for my phone the moment writing got hard.

Silence is a writing tool. Most of us just never get enough of it.

Elliot

My daily rhythm

Without trying to plan it, I fell into a routine that I still think about:

1. Wake around six, make coffee and sit on the porch with a notebook.
2. Write from seven until noon, with short walks when I got stuck.
3. Pick up the lunch basket left on the porch and eat outside.
4. Walk the long trail in the afternoon, or nap, or read in the library.
5. Write again from three until six, usually revising the morning’s pages.
6. Dinner at the main house, conversation and early to bed.

The lunch basket deserves its own mention. Each day, someone from the residency staff quietly left a basket on every porch with a sandwich, soup, fruit and a cookie. You never had to see anyone if you didn’t want to. It was one of the kindest things I have ever experienced, and it meant the whole day belonged to the work.

Dinner with strangers

Every evening, painters, poets and composers at one long table.

Dinner was the only fixed social time of the day, and it became the part I looked forward to most. After hours of silence, it was a joy to hear other voices. There were three painters, two composers, a sculptor, a playwright, three poets and one other novelist, along with me. Most of us had never met before.

Talking with artists who work in other forms changed how I thought about my own. A composer named Lena Park (fictional) described how she builds a piece around silence, letting rests carry as much meaning as notes. I went back to my cabin and cut three paragraphs from a chapter, leaving a single short line in their place. A painter, Marcus Bell (fictional), talked about stepping back from a canvas every twenty minutes to see the whole. I started printing my chapters and reading them in the library, away from the desk, to do the same.

Not every conversation was about art. We talked about families, bad jobs, favorite diners and the best way to start a woodstove. On the last night of my second week, the playwright organized a reading where everyone shared five minutes of work in progress. I read the opening of a chapter I had written that morning. It was terrifying and wonderful.

Afterward, people offered small, generous responses rather than critiques. A poet said one image stayed with her. The sculptor asked what the younger sister’s room looked like, a question I couldn’t answer and spent the next morning writing about. Those six weeks reminded me that feedback doesn’t always need to fix anything. Sometimes it only needs to show you where a reader is paying attention.

What I got done

By the numbers, I wrote about two hundred new pages in six weeks. More importantly, I solved a problem that had stalled my novel for months: how to move the story across a long, quiet year in the middle. With unbroken time, I could hold the whole book in my head at once and see where the gaps were.

• Finished the second half of the draft, which had been stuck for months
• Rewrote the opening chapter four times until it felt right
• Filled one notebook with ideas for a future story collection
• Read eleven books from the residency library
• Learned to build a decent fire, which I count as a life skill

Key takeaway: Unbroken time doesn’t just let you write more. It lets you see the whole shape of the work.

Bringing the woods home

Coming home was harder than I expected. Within a day, the phone was back in my hand, the inbox was full and the quiet was gone. But I brought a few habits with me. I now keep my phone in another room during morning writing. I take a long walk most afternoons, without headphones. And I try, once a week, to have a long dinner with friends who make things.

If you are a writer thinking about applying to a residency, I encourage you to try. Many are free or low-cost, and some offer stipends or support for travel. Read the guidelines carefully, apply to several and don’t be discouraged by rejections, which are common. Even a single week of protected time can change how you work.

And if a residency isn’t possible right now, consider building a small version at home. Turn off the internet for a morning. Take a walk with no destination. Share a meal with someone who makes things in a different way than you do. You might be surprised how much quiet you can find when you go looking for it.