A guest blog from Charlie Ellis, a writer, researcher and teacher based in Edinburgh.
"We write alone. The keyboard is made for just two hands, the pen for only one. In a busy café the woman writing is in a world of her own, locked on to her machine and locked in to what she is doing, which is something nobody else can do, something she must do on her own. She's there but not there, not in the way other people are. Where is she, and who is she with?"
There But Not There
Freeman’s observation captures something true and slightly paradoxical about writing. It is, at its core, a solitary endeavour, and yet many of us do not write in solitude. We write in cafés, in libraries, in open-plan offices, at communal tables. We choose to be surrounded by the ambient hum of other lives while retreating, simultaneously, into our own. There is something about that surrounding energy, the overheard fragment of conversation, the sense that others are also absorbed in their own work, that makes the act of writing feel less lonely, even if it remains, technically, alone.
This tension between solitude and company, between retreat and connection, is what makes the Binks Hub Writing Retreat at the Edinburgh Futures Institute such an interesting proposition. On the surface, it offers something simple: a carved-out morning in a busy schedule, a few hours in which to do what we already know we should be doing. But in practice, it offers something richer. It offers two things that are, on reflection, deeply connected: the conditions for deep work, and the possibility of procreative conversation. Whether it fully deserves the name ‘retreat’, however, is a question worth considering.
When I first heard of the writing retreat, I pictured something romantic: a lochside cottage, a haven from the city, a peaceful and creatively sustaining environment. The image that came to mind was Barnhill, George Orwell’s retreat on Jura, where, battling severe illness, he worked on the final drafts of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Jura was in my mind having recently read Spirit of Jura: Fictions, essays, poems from the Jura Lodge. Barnhill was, and to a considerable extent still is, deliberately disconnected from the modern world; that remoteness was precisely its appeal for Orwell. Measured against that fantasy, the actual venue, a spacious room on the upper floors of the Edinburgh Futures Institute, might seem a mild disappointment. But I quickly came to see the value of what was actually on offer.
The Important Work Takes Time
The writer and academic Cal Newport has articulated what many knowledge workers feel but struggle to name. In his concept of deep work, Newport defines a mode of focused, uninterrupted concentration on cognitively demanding tasks, a state of flow in which mental faculties are pushed to their limit, producing work that is genuinely difficult to replicate. This stands in contrast to what Newport calls shallow work: the logistical, low-demand tasks (emails, routine meetings, administrative messaging) that fill our days and crowd out the important things.
Reflecting back on his book Deep Work (2016), Newport has noted that the problems he identified have been “getting steadily worse”. Where his original concern was simply helping people carve out time for focused thinking, he now believes something more fundamental is at stake: that we are “rapidly losing the ability to think deeply at all”.
The causes are multiple. Instant messaging tools like Slack and video platforms like Zoom intensified workplace distraction over the past decade. Social media has “morphed into an addictive TikTok-ified slurry of optimised brain rot”. And AI tools now offer what Newport calls “quick-fix short-cuts to whatever intellectually engaging work activities remain”, threatening to hollow out the last refuges of genuine cognitive effort.
Newport’s diagnosis of contemporary academic and professional life is pointed. We live, he argues, in a distraction economy, in which the capacity for sustained concentration is becoming rarer precisely as it becomes more valuable. Email, once a tool for efficiently sharing documents, has expanded into an inescapable torrent. Social media fragments attention into ever-shorter intervals. The result is a working culture dominated by the frictionless and the immediate, in which the slow, difficult, rewarding work of sustained thinking becomes ever harder to protect.
His proposed remedy is deliberately unglamorous: time-blocking. Not just scheduling meetings and appointments, but treating deep work as an appointment in its own right, a protected slot in the diary, as inviolable as any external commitment. For those working in universities and similar institutions, this might mean designated office hours for open-door availability, preserving the remainder for concentrated work. The key insight is that focus, like any demanding activity, requires deliberate cultivation and active protection. It does not simply happen in the gaps.
The Binks Hub Writing Retreat is, in this sense, an institutionalised form of Newport’s advice. It creates, in a structured way, what most of us struggle to create for ourselves: a block of time that has been publicly designated for deep work, in a context where the expectation of interruption has been suspended.
The structure matters too. It would be easy enough simply to gather people in a room and give them a morning to get on with things. But the opening activities consistently succeed in shifting one into a writing frame of mind, and they do so without any sense of pressure or judgement. I have found them useful and mentally refreshing before shifting to whatever I have come to work on, which is usually something I know well (possibly too well): pieces deep in the redrafting process. It has been unglamorous work: responding to comments, polishing sentences, tightening arguments. Yet it is exactly the kind of sustained, patient attention that good writing requires and that ordinary working life rarely permits. Newport is right to insist that there are no shortcuts. The important work takes time and depth of thought. As he puts it, ideas are easy, writing is hard.
This also relates to something often overlooked in romantic accounts of writing. Most of it is not inspiration. Most of it is slog: working through drafts, responding to criticism, grinding through the revision that stands between a decent first attempt and a publishable piece. When people read finished articles and remark on how polished and coherent they seem, they rarely see the work that produced that impression. Academic writing is inherently iterative and rarely glamorous. This is the argument that runs through Lewis Minkin‘s minor classic Exits and Entrances: Political Research as a Creative Art. Behind every finished product, he notes, “there are a hundred flawed, adjusted and at times wasted efforts”.
The Writing Retreat does not promise epiphany. It promises something more modest and more useful: the conditions in which this necessary work can actually get done. Others have found that the space of the retreat has allowed them to write in ways they had not expected. As one participant put it, “I kind of wrote something by accident”, though in truth what they produced had clearly been forming for some time. In their colourful phrase, it was “like a cat finally ridding itself of a furball, a furball vomit”. Again, writing is not a matter of glamorous moments of inspiration. It is work that needs time and a bit of mental space, exactly what the Binks Hub Writing Retreat creates. That sense of productive accident is something I have benefitted from too. In one session, Jemma Neville introduced the work of the essayist and poet Kathleen Jamie at the outset. I had already quoted Jamie in a piece I was drafting on the shortage of cultural magazines in Edinburgh and Scotland. The nudge I got in that session helped me return to that piece with a clearer sense of direction.
Conversation That Creates New Cards
And yet there is another dimension to these gatherings beyond the opportunity for deep work.
Theodore Zeldin (1933), the historian and social philosopher, has spent much of his career thinking about what conversation can be at its best, and how rarely it achieves that potential. The subtitle of his book Conversation (1999) is: ‘How talk can change your life’. Zeldin argues that our world is full of talking but starved of genuine exchange. Social networks, he suggests, “have mainly specialised in brief and superficial exchanges” between people existing within “non-geographic communities”, sharing a particular, narrow interest. These interactions, however numerous, lack the generative friction of real encounters. For Zeldin, “creativity needs to be fuelled by more than polite chat”.
What Zeldin values instead is the meeting of genuinely different minds. When that happens, he argues, something more than information is exchanged: “when minds meet they don’t just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards”. The metaphor he reaches for is biological: he speaks of procreative conversation, exchanges from which both parties emerge genuinely changed, in which we are “prepared to emerge a slightly different person”. True creativity, in Zeldin’s account, is not a solitary achievement: “We can’t just sit and think out of our own heads.” We need, all of us, some kind of muse, some form of genuine encounter with the other, to produce something whose shape we could not have predicted. As he asks, rhetorically: “Is a successful conversation one which goes exactly as planned?” The most valuable exchanges are precisely those that take us somewhere unplanned. This is why he values encounters across difference, including difference of discipline, background and field. A number of participants in the Writing Retreats I have attended have mentioned the value of the ‘little chats’ in the breaks, with people from different fields and backgrounds (some participants come from the writing world rather than academia). That these chats are positively encouraged by those leading the sessions helps participants to overcome any innate resistance. I am sure that genuine collaboration has been engendered by the sessions.
Zeldin is also notably sceptical of the inward turn in contemporary culture: the culture of retreats, journalling and mindfulness, with its emphasis on self-examination and self-knowledge. He questions what he calls “the virtues of introspection”, arguing that it risks becoming a cul-de-sac. The question ‘who am I?’ is one, he suggests, that “people have asked for centuries and have always got the wrong answer because you cannot know yourself fully”. For Zeldin, any true insight into ourselves and others derives not from retreat but from meaningful engagement with the world: we should not be withdrawing from others but seeking them out. The right question is not ‘who am I?’ but ‘who are you?’ Other people, he insists, “are infinitely more interesting” and “have infinitely more to say”.
This is a direct challenge to a certain idea of what a writing retreat is for. If the point is simply to go inward, to close the door, to be alone with one’s thoughts and one’s document, then Zeldin might have some sceptical questions to ask about it. But the Binks Hub retreat, as I have experienced it, does not quite fit that model. It is not a withdrawal. It is, or can be, something closer to what Zeldin actually advocates.
The Invisible Norms Break Down
I recognise the value of his challenge in my own writing life, and not only in formal settings. I am someone who likes to write in cafés, at shared tables where there is energy and ambient life around you, and where the overheard conversation occasionally sparks something unexpected. I have always been mildly frustrated that when I am surrounded by other people who are clearly also writing, there is rarely any acknowledgement of that shared endeavour. We are all doing something broadly similar, often something demanding, and yet the invisible norms of British public life decree that we sit in parallel solitude.
Occasionally, however, those norms break down, and something interesting happens. Once, having just finished an interview in a café, the person sitting nearby at the shared table asked me about it. We ended up talking at length: about sport and disadvantaged communities (the subject of my interview), about disabled sports research (his field), and eventually about specialty coffee, which turned out to be a shared enthusiasm. We had not set out to have that conversation. Neither of us could have predicted where it would go. It was, in Zeldin’s sense, procreative.
The Writing Retreat creates a more deliberate version of this possibility. What has struck me most in the sessions I have attended is the sheer range of things people are working on. There is real value in being pulled out of one’s own silo, in being reminded of the breadth of things there are to write about and, by extension, of the inherent narrowness of one’s own focus. The retreat gathers writers together, acknowledges the community of shared endeavour, and lowers the threshold for the kind of exchange that might otherwise never happen. There is, in my experience, a particular honesty that emerges in such settings, and the breaks are where Zeldin’s procreative conversation becomes genuinely possible. I have found these among the most valuable parts of the sessions I have attended: discovering unexpected connections with people working in entirely different fields, and encountering subjects I had not previously thought of as academic territory at all.
Zeldin’s wider thinking about work is also relevant here. He argues that most workplaces remain stuck in a twentieth-century mode, failing to reflect our ‘innate curiosity’ and leaving ‘a massive amount of unused potential’ unrealised. Work, he insists, is “a relationship, not just a contract”, and it should be reconceived “as a social and cultural activity” with “the aim of enhancing intellects, imaginations and sensitivities”, rather than simply producing goods and services measured in quantitative terms. The practical implication is that work should be about “bringing strangers together and stimulating them to learn from one another”. This is ambitious language for a writing retreat, but there is something in it that resonates. When we gather as writers from different disciplines and career stages, we are, in a modest but real way, doing something like this. I have found that conversations with people working in the arts are consistently among the most generative for my own writing: they prompt new ways of seeing, which is, in the end, what good writing requires.
Disconnecting to Connect
There is an apparent tension between these two things, deep work and procreative conversation. Newport’s framework is fundamentally about reducing friction, clearing away distraction, protecting the solitary concentration that demanding work requires. Zeldin’s is about embracing the unexpected, remaining open to encounters that will take us somewhere we had not planned to go. And as we have seen, Zeldin is not entirely sympathetic to the idea of retreat as such, with its suggestion of withdrawal and inwardness. We should not, he argues, be retreating from others but engaging with them. That, in his view, is the route to a fuller life.
But this tension is more apparent than real. The Writing Retreat, as I have experienced it, is not an act of withdrawal. It is a morning in which both deep work and genuine connection become possible, precisely because of the deliberateness of the setting. The act of showing up, of designating this time as set apart from the usual demands of professional life, creates the conditions for focus. And the fact that you are doing this in company, with others who are engaged in the same difficult endeavour, creates the conditions for something else: a sense of shared purpose, a lowered threshold for genuine exchange, an increased chance of encountering the unexpected reference, the surprising perspective, the conversation that creates new cards.
Newport would recognise the value of protecting this time. Zeldin would recognise the value of sharing it. The name ‘retreat’ perhaps slightly undersells what the event actually offers. It is not so much a withdrawal as an act of deliberate intentionality: creating space in which both depth and connection become possible, freed from the shallow noise of the everyday. Conversation, Zeldin reminds us, is “still in its infancy” as a human activity. A writing retreat, approached in the right spirit, might be one small way of helping it grow. We disconnect, in other words, in order to connect more deeply, and with more of ourselves.
Charlie Ellis is an Edinburgh-based researcher, writer, and EFL teacher. After completing his doctorate at the University of Sheffield, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, before moving into English language teaching. His writing spans culture (including the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe), politics (especially analysing radical right ideas), specialty coffee, sport, and education. He contributes regularly to publications such as Scottish Affairs, Society, Modern English Teacher, and various Scottish outlets, including The Leither, Sceptical Scot, and Bella Caledonia.
