The Rule of Silence: For Your Next Writing Vacation

 

You’ve got five days off and a weekend on either side. You are a writer, or at least you want to be. But every time you start writing, family, friends, vendors, even strangers find a way to interrupt you. What then?

Whether it’s a play, musical, book, short story or graphic novel, you need to write it. You need the time, not only the time it takes to find the words, but the head space required to do your plotting and find the characters.

You don’t even know what you need to get there — but you know you need something.

Enter Joan Drury. Supporter of women. Saver of lives.

Joan founded a group called Harmony Women’s Fund that supported women writers (and maybe other artists, too). She also owned a publishing house called Spinsters Ink and two bookstores. But what she did that saved my life no doubt saved many others.

It was called Norcroft, and it was a women’s writing colony on the north shore of Minnesota. You had to apply, and I was lucky enough to win two spots there during two different summers.

Norcroft not only gave me the time to write by supplying a beautiful room and house, food, and lovely company. It enforced a rule of silence that ensured no one could interrupt me, whether I was using my writing shed, making lunch, or just sitting inside watching a rainstorm.

The silence began at 9 a.m. and was over at 5 p.m. Before I got to Norcroft, I was feeling a bit rebellious about the whole thing and wasn’t sure how I would handle it. I had been told it was because women rarely got to stay in their heads all day long, and writing is nothing if not about staying in your head.

Read more on Medium in Counter Arts.