Retreating: running away from the battle to write

Have you ever been tempted by the adverts for writers' retreats? Do they really help you write more?

I've been on one official retreat, which was a bit of a disaster: after a single day of writing I got labyrinthitis and spent the rest of the time feeling sick as the world swayed like a ship beneath me. It should have worked. I went with three other lovely writers - all more famous and successful than me, and all better at not having labyrinthitis. It was a proper writers' retreat, with all our food provided, lovely countryside to walk in, a fire to write by, prosecco delivered to our desks at 6pm, and so on.

This year I'm doing it a bit differently. I'm at the Hilton in Olbia, Sardinia, with no one else. The hotel is in a cultural and aesthetic desert so there should be nothing to lure me away from the desk. There is no one to chat to. If I don't write I'll get bored.

Which brings me to pondering the word. Is a writer's retreat a sort of running away, like a retreating army? Or is it re-treat, as in have a nice time again? This place is definitely a batten-down-the-hatches-and-get-stuff-done kind of place. My only stipulation to myself is that I don't use the time to work on the commissioned work I would be doing if I'd stayed at home, but that I use it to do the projects that get shuffled aside: one that my agent has been waiting for for quite a long time and one that is brand new and she doesn't know is coming.

I started with the first, with reading and thinking and trying to find the holes and restructure where necessary. But I'm not excited by it here. I can't get into cold London fog when it's bright Italian sunshine outside. Also, I write best in cafes but it's been too windy the last couple of days to do that (I mean, to sit outside in a cafe). So I turned to the other one which is still fresh and exciting. I know, finish the old one first - but they are very different and the second is easier to do here. It's a bit like retreating from the retreat, though. Tackling the first project required a retreat from life to get the thing done and this is a re-treat - a chance to enjoy it all again. Perhaps that's what it should really be about: reinvigorating that love of the job that got us all here in the first place.

I'm starting to think a week won't be long enough, though. Maybe I need to become one of those people who lives in a hotel, probably Simpsons on the Strand, writing in pyjamas and having lunch and cocktails. But perhaps a permanent retreat doesn't work and I'd have to start borrowing houses and families from people so I had some responsibilities to re(-)treat from.