Plans and surprises! Booker Prize & a Bali retreat

The Booker Prize and a coming retreat

Well! I did say that obedience to one’s plans can be a trap, but did not know then exactly how much my plans might change.

To my great surprise, a couple of days after the last newsletter was posted in September, the 2024 Booker Prize longlisting for my novel Stone Yard Devotional turned into a shortlisting. Which has blown my mind.

I send my heartfelt congratulations to the 2024 Booker winner, Samantha Harvey, for her beautiful, powerful novel Orbital. I spent a little time with Sam and the other shortlisted writers in London and Manchester in the days preceding last week’s announcement and was delighted at the really collegiate warmth shown by all of the shortlist writers towards one another. Samantha was the most modest and thoughtful of all of us, I thought. I loved how she spoke about her writing and this book.

You will have seen Sam’s absolutely beautiful acceptance speech, but I also loved this very quick chat she did with Waterstones. It should offer inspiration and consolation to writers and shows what a loyal publisher means to a writer.

waterstones

A post shared by @waterstones

And here, for those interested, are some pictures of my time in London with the shortlist events at Manchester Waterstones and the Royal Festival Hall Southbank, then a meeting with Queen Camilla at Clarence House (😳) and then the big night. I had a fantastic, terrifying, nerve-wracking but also thoroughly joyful evening with my beloved Sceptre editor Federico Andornino (pictured at the end), publicist Louise Court, my agents Jenny Darling and Veronique Baxter as well as my very loved husband Sean. What a night.

Now I’m home, ferociously jet lagged and feeling as if I’ve had a very strange, very intense dream. But so happy to be home and to have some time opening up ahead of me for … you guessed it, writing. Plans, take two!

A retreat in Bali, March 2025

Before I go I want to let you know of this beautiful retreat I’ll be leading in Ubud, Bali, from March 16-23 next year. It’s called Nine Experiments for Enriching Your Creativity and I would so love writers of serious intent, in any genre or form, to apply. You can be at any stage of your project’s development. I’ve run this same program three times before, and each time had an excellent response, with many participants saying it has permanently transformed their creative process for the better.

We will be letting successful applicants know on December 11, so there’s not much time left. We are already receiving wonderful applications and places are limited of course so please do apply now!

All the details are here on the website of the Ubud Writers’ Festival, which is hosting our retreat. But here’s a summary:

The Intuitive Writer:
Nine Experiments for Enriching your Creativity

I have always been fascinated by the details of the creative process. My own experience and my research into other artists’ methods have taught me that the substance of a true work of art emerges slowly and organically - through experimentation and failure, discovery and rediscovery. I would describe my own process as half blind groping in the dark, and half ruthless tenacity and discipline. I believe creativity is mysterious and beautiful, talent is something you can develop with attention and willpower, and confidence comes with practice.

In this week-long retreat, you will learn and practise the Nine Experiments I developed through my PhD research into the creative process at the University of New South Wales, and which I have detailed in my book The Luminous Solution.

You know already that writers often dedicate years to a book before they know if it will come together – tolerating uncertainty is the bedrock of the creative life. My doctoral research involved a study of acclaimed writers in the middle of a work in progress. I wanted to find out if they were unconsciously using any specific creative techniques that I might be able to identify, map and borrow to enhance my own working processes. Guess what? They were, and I could.

Through this work I discovered the nine creative processes, common to many artists but rarely or never before represented in other models of creativity. From these I developed my Nine Experiments, which can be applied at almost any stage of a work’s development to kick progress along. They are especially useful at times when you’re bored or stuck. In this retreat I’ll be sharing these processes with you, showing how using them at different stages of your project can help you find the real heart of your work, overcome creative blocks and revive your love of writing.

The processes are:

• Heat seeking

• Drilling, digging, diving

• Connecting, merging, associating

• Waiting, postponing, suspending

• Cycling & Circling

• Disrupting & overturning

• Inhabiting & impersonation

• Territory mapping

• Forecasting & hypothesising

Each morning we’ll start with a two-hour workshop featuring one or two of the nine processes, with plenty of time for questions and deep discussion. At the end of the morning’s workshop each writer will receive a page of specially designed, practical exercises for applying the newly learned experiment to their work in progress, but participants can spend the rest of each day as they wish. Each afternoon there will be a debriefing session for discussion of how the day’s progress has been, and tips for further inspiration.

There’s a very simple application process - application form and all other details at the Ubud Writers’ Festival site here. IMPORTANT: Please direct any questions about the retreat to the folks at Ubud rather than to me because I may not see them here or have time to answer.

In other news…

• We’re gearing up for February publication of Stone Yard Devotional in North America with the wonderful Riverhead Books (pre-orders welcome!), who published my previous novel The Weekend. More details to come. But in the meantime, I would love you to read this absolutely beautiful piece at Literary Hub by Leanne Ogasawara - on contemplation, solitude, finding a room of one’s own, which riffs off Leanne’s reading of my novel. I will be rereading this essay for a long time to come.
  

• Another recent piece that will stay with me forever is this Harper’s essay by Yiyun Li, one of the judges of the Booker Prize and a writer I respect enormously. ‘The Seventy Percent: On Minor Characters and Human Possibility’ may be the touchstone essay I’ll be keeping close to my heart as I write my next novel. It’s just magnificent.
  

• And last - another careful, calm essay is by Anne Enright, on reading Alice Munro now, in the New York Review of Books. Customarily unflinching, deeply thought and brilliant.
  
  These last two are behind a paywall, as all good writing is worth paying for - I have digital subscriptions to many literary magazines and they are absolutely worth it if you can spare the cash. I know many can’t.
  

• And finally, I have cautiously joined the millions signing up to Bluesky. I left Twitter in 2016 after the first horror inauguration, but have missed the ability to share links, and am interested to see whether it will manage to avoid becoming a toxic cesspool, at which point I’ll escape again. In the meantime if you’re there, I’m at @charlottewood.bsky.social.

Till next time!