Issue 13: 20k words in 3 days

Dear reader,

I did it. I wrote a total of 23,941 words in three days.

It’s the most I’ve ever written in that amount of time. It was cool to prove to myself that I’m capable of more than I think I am.

Going into the weekend, I was excited but skeptical—could I really write the most I ever had in three days, after so much travel and from a place of what felt like a deep personal deficit? It felt like very bad conditions for art, as my sister has previously written about. I wanted to feel more rested, prepared, and settled in my physical world so I could fully give myself over to the world of my novel. I suppose that is what makes the conditions “ideal” for writing, but I also know that so much of creative work is just about showing up to the page. You make your own conditions, and if I am always waiting around for ideal, well. No writing would ever get done.

But this retreat at Spruceton Inn (a perfect birthday gift from Nicole) was about as ideal conditions for writing as I could hope for. I just had to lock in.

Under the adept tutelage of Chloé Caldwell and Jillian Eugenios, I was introduced to many Oblique Strategies, taught to rethink what a craft book could be, pushed to let go of my ideas of “good” writing, but most importantly, I was reminded of the joy in writing, and that innate feeling of accomplishment that comes from simply using my brain. To write long requires pushing through discomfort, fear, and perfectionism, a practice that feels increasingly scarce these days. Contemporary society demands less and less firsthand thought, with tech companies perpetuating the erosion of our attention and supplying ever-increasing means of distraction. A weekend of writing nearly 24k words using only the generative power of my own imperfect brain felt like, in many ways, the antidote to this modern condition: the purported “inevitability” of AI, the depletion of cognitive ability and outsourcing of our willingness to think and discover things for ourselves.

Chloé said to us that if you want to write a book, you have to write long. Tough but fair. Writing is fun, she reminded us, and it is a privilege to be able to do what we want on the page. Her take was a refreshing one against my initial mindset entrenched in the slog of writing, feeling like writing is hard. The days where it feels like writing even a single word is like trying to pull a stubborn dog along on a walk that she has decided is not for her to go on. But something does happen when you push through this uncertainty—afterwards, the feeling of having done it is fulfilling and rewarding unlike any other, when I genuinely reach flow state as I’m writing. This is fun, I think to myself. “We wanted to do this, we wanted to be here, we want to write a book,” Nicole and I kept repeating to ourselves as motivation on our first day, as we wrote towards our first check-in of 5,500 words at 5pm on that Saturday. By Sunday, both of us felt the shift from thinking in the hundreds of words to thinking in the thousands. The yardstick had changed. By the time we got to our last 2k words, Nicole and I each found the remaining word count easy and not at all daunting in the way that it felt just a couple days ago. In the regular rhythm of my weekly writing routine, that “ease” of writing 2k words would have been unthinkable.

Writing long is an iterative process of discomfort, endurance, and incremental clarity. I developed a tolerance for what I didn’t yet understand—in my novel and for my characters, yes, but also in myself—once I broke through doing what I thought was the hard thing, I felt more of a desire to repeat the process. Writing this much made the pages and words feel like a “doorway” for me, as George Saunders calls it. This practice of making art, the practice of writing, has its own intrinsic value. It is, on its own, worth it.

Creative Contract

Our parting exercise was to list our blocks, motivators, and other intentions or reminders for continuing the creative process, especially through low points. I’m including mine below:

Creative Contract: This Agreement may be executed in one or more counterparts.

1. Write one sentence every day, first thing in the morning upon waking. Do not pick up your phone, do not brush your teeth, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Just start writing—one sentence.

2. Writing does not have to be literal forward progress in my manuscript. Character sketches, copying words from books I love, and focused project research all count. The only rule is: I have to write it directly into the messy manuscript draft.

3. Rethink what a craft book is, like How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea, draw inspiration from other mediums, take noticing walks.

4. Make yourself a menu of different ways into your project. Appetizers, mains, and dessert. For example, printing in progress to get my manuscript off the screen and into my hands, or writing the thing I’ve been avoiding.

5. Remember Bong Joon Ho’s advice on daily rituals to start writing and embrace simplicity as the strategy. Try to avoid anything dramatic or some kind of fancy ritual, and instead think about writing effortlessly, like breathing, and without making a big deal out of it.

6. (Unless you need to make a bigger deal out of it to keep going.)

7. I will get to know the characters of my creative anti-team inside my head. Starting lineup: Little Miss Perfect, Max the Monster of Self-Doubt, Uma the Undisciplined, and Mr. People Pleaser.

8. Learn to say, “no thank you.”

9. Choose moments of friction, and don’t shy away from inconvenience.

10. Remember: I want to do this. I am writing a novel.

Hereby signed,

katie

May 19, 2026 at Spruceton Inn, West Kill, NY

Witnessed: Attendees of the 20k words retreat

Further takeaways and resources

• Chloé Caldwell and Jillian Eugenios were such amazing retreat organizers. The thoughtfulness that went into planning and structuring our three writing days really showed, with the details fully taken care of. Meals were all provided, along with beverages and plenty of coffee. Chloé and Jillian brought an assortment of craft books, card decks, and so much great inspiration and writing resources for getting unstuck. Spruceton was a perfect place. Casey, the head innkeeper, was a gracious and welcoming host, and I’m so grateful to have had a chance to chat with her during the morning breakfast hours. Go buy their books! Support their work!
• Because the novel is long, Chloé recommended we find tactile and analog ways to engage with our book throughout the writing process. “The more you can get it out of the screen and into your hands, it’s a physical reminder to keep going,” she said. One of the prompts for our last day was to design our own book covers (though I had to de-prioritize this given the P0 of hitting my word count). Chloé and Jillian told us to print out the cover and tape it on another book, and put it somewhere visible in our home—display on a bookshelf, or keep it on a coffee table as a reminder.
• Under the time pressure of writing 20k words in three days, I really had no time to worry about if what I was writing was “good” or not, and I really had to jettison any preconceived notions of what I thought I needed to write, or where I had planned for my project to go. I had to keep myself open to exploring different directions and most importantly, I just had to keep putting words the page.
• I’m newly obsessed with the Oblique Strategies card deck. On the first day, I asked, “What does my protagonist want?” The card I drew read, “You are an engineer.” Got my ass.
• Select writing strategies for getting unstuck: Write Or…’s writing tool (with dead mode! on, so it auto-deletes your words if you hesitate or wait too long to type), trying different fonts or colors when writing in your manuscript, using locations to vary entrypoints into your project, 15 minute writing candles to go fully analog (by pure coincidence, my friend Elizabeth had already bought me a set as a birthday gift!)
• Rethink what a craft book is. While I did bring my own marked up copy of Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts, and turned to that often for different generative first draft reminders, One of the books Jillian brought that I found unexpected inspiration from was How To Read Water: Clues, Signs & Patterns from Puddles to the Sea by Tristan Gooley. My protagonist is a surfer, yet somehow I had never put two and two together to seek direction from the ocean or bodies of water.

“What prevents me from writing the book? The heat, the dog, the day, air-conditioning, desiring to exist in the present tense, constant thinking, sickness, fucking, groceries, cooking, yoga, loneliness and sadness, the internet, political depression, my period, obsession with skin care, late capitalism, binge-watching television on my computer, competition and jealousy over the attention of other writers, confusion over the novel, circling around but not finishing anything, reading, researching, masturbating, time passing.” — Kate Zambreno, Drifts

It seems to me that one way to reclaim some of our lives and time for ourselves, to experience the satisfaction that comes with achieving something meaningful and worthwhile, is to push through creative discomfort—and simply write.

Just keep swimming,

✏️ katie “I wrote 20k words in 3 days and I’ll never shut up about it” 📝