I'm working on the final draft of A Year of Writing Dangerously and just came across this entry about driving up to Lake Arrowhead for the writers retreat last fall. 

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61. Retreating to Play

Driving up to the mountains to conduct a writers retreat, I hear a commercial on the radio, something about health – about how we all need to play to be healthier, but that as we grow up, gathering information takes precedence over being creative, and we stop playing.

It’s the perfect opening idea for a writers retreat – let’s play!  Ideally at a retreat you let go of outside information; you listen to yourself.  You let go of what you should know, need to learn. You play. You create.

I once did writing workshops in an elementary school and it was the kindergarteners and kids in the early grades who knew how to play with words. “A horn sounds red!” one wrote.  “Mad is like touching the devil,” another wrote. “Mad is so bad it tastes like liver.”  By the time they got to third grade they were obsessing about whether to write their names in the upper left hand or right hand corner of the page.