It’s Alice in my Cambridge group we have to thank for my ‘quiet writing’ groups in north Kent. It was her suggestion that my Churchill Writers group meet for a retreat each year, for a whole weekend. No intense workshops and skills training, thank you. The most valuable thing of all, she assured me and the other writers agreed, is to have ring-fenced time away from demands so that writers can do what we love best: just sit and write.

I have transported this to the north Kent coast where I live and now, twice a month, I invite other writers to meet me in a cafe where we can sit in silence and write to our hearts’ content. That’s what a group of us did yesterday afternoon in The Old Curiosity Shop tea shop in Broadstairs, north Kent (with a paddle on Viking Bay afterwards) and it was a magical experience.

There’s no need to have anything prepared. It’s purely about turning up and being with other writers, enjoying that special energy we conjure up whenever we’re together. Heads down and in time, if we just keep writing, catching whatever comes, a portal opens. Writing floods through that can land us in something extraordinary beyond what we thought we knew. Whether we’re blocked or are laden with excellent plans, these sessions can take us by the hand into a different flavour of writing, something expansive and new, and sometimes a style we never knew we had.

Happy writing wherever you are, and let’s treasure our writing buddies everywhere.

The Old Curiosity Shop tea room in Broadstairs, north Kent