Say the words “writing retreat” to a PhD researcher and watch their eyes light up around one thing: the word count. A few days away from supervision meetings, teaching admin, and emails arriving in the background. Just you, a laptop, and a target you have been promising yourself for months, whether that is two thousand words, a full chapter, or finally cracking open the section you have been avoiding.
That is what most of us think we are signing up for. It is not, in the end, what a writing retreat actually gives you.
The real gift of a retreat has very little to do with the number of words you leave with.
It Shows You What Was Really Stopping You
Take away the laundry, the commute, the “quick” errands, and the meetings that quietly eat a morning, and something uncomfortable happens: you run out of excuses. For a lot of us, that is the first time we discover that the thing standing between us and the page was never really time. It was not knowing what we wanted to argue yet. It was the fear that the paragraph would come out wrong. It was the quiet belief that our writing needed to be brilliant before it was allowed to be visible at all.
A retreat cannot write your thesis for you, but it can strip away enough noise that you finally meet the actual obstacle instead of the convenient one you have been blaming for months. That is uncomfortable. It is also one of the most useful things that can happen to a PhD researcher, because you cannot solve a problem you have not correctly named.
It Shows You That Writing Does Not Have to Be Lonely
There is a particular kind of silence in a room full of researchers who are all stuck on their own chapters at the same time. Nobody is talking. Everyone is somewhere between typing and staring at the ceiling. And somehow, it is one of the least lonely experiences of the entire PhD.
Doing a doctorate can make writing feel like something you owe the world in secret, a private struggle between you and a blinking cursor. Sitting beside other people doing the same difficult, uncertain work reminds you that the struggle is not a personal failing. It is simply what this stage of research looks like for almost everyone in the room, however put together they appear on the outside. For those of us working with heavy material, survivors’ testimonies, trauma, grief, whatever your version of that is, that shared quiet can matter even more. It is easier to sit with difficult subject matter when you are not sitting with it entirely alone.
It Shows You That Progress Rarely Looks Dramatic
Most structured retreats do not ask you to write for eight uninterrupted hours. They break the day into short, focused bursts with real breaks in between: a walk, a meal, a stretch, a conversation that has nothing to do with your thesis. At first, this can feel like it is working against the goal. Surely more hours means more words.
What it actually teaches you is that consistency beats intensity. A focused ninety minutes, done properly and then genuinely rested from, will usually produce more honest, usable writing than a guilt-fuelled all-day slog that leaves you too fried to write anything the next day. Progress on a retreat rarely feels dramatic while it is happening. It is only when you look back at the end of the week, at pages that did not exist on Monday, that you see it was never about one heroic burst of inspiration. It was about showing up again and again, in small, unglamorous stretches.
Worth the Trip
None of this means retreats are magic, or that you will leave one with every writing problem solved. You probably will not. What you are more likely to leave with is a clearer sense of what actually gets in your way, a reminder that you are not the only one finding this hard, and proof that steady, ordinary effort adds up to something real.
If SGSAH or your university offers a writing retreat this year, and part of you has been putting off signing up because you are not sure you will hit some imagined target, go anyway. Go for the room full of people quietly doing the same hard thing. Go to find out what is really stopping you. Go to remember that showing up, again and again, in small unglamorous stretches, is what a thesis is actually made of.
The word count was never really the point.
About the Author
Olivia Shaw-Lovell is a first-year PhD candidate at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, and the SGSAH blog’s resident writer. Funded by the AHRC through the SGSAH Doctoral Training Partnership, her research explores how Jamaican women survivors of gender-based violence draw on faith and spirituality to navigate trauma and pursue healing, situated within World Christianity, womanist theology, and decolonial scholarship. She writes about the PhD journey with the same honesty she brings to her research.
Follow along on Instagram @livzevolve, or get in touch about writing for the blog at olivia.shaw-lovell@glasgow.ac.uk.
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