Diana Plater attended Jan Cornall’s writing retreat in March and this article appeared in The Weekend Australia on 23 April 2011.

The benefits of a creative writing course at a simple resort on the island of Vanua Levu.

by Diana Plater

TEN years is a long time for a manuscript to sit in a bottom drawer, especially when it hasn’t been completed. But that’s the situation with my latest book. I’ve done most of the research and interviews, written an outline and a couple of chapters, given it a title, attempted to turn it into a play and considered a chick-lit conversion.

But two chapters do not a novel make.

I am greatly in need of inspiration and ways to break writer’s block. As Jackie Collins once advised: ‘‘Write, don’t talk about it.’’

So when an invitation arrives to do a creative writing course in an exotic location how can I refuse? And especially when it’s titled Breakthrough Writing in Fiji.

The course, taught by playwright, novelist and performer Jan Cornall, is one of several types run each year at Daku Resort, on Fiji’s northern and less-visited island of Vanua Levu, just a kilometre or so up the road from the colourful town of Savusavu.

Cornall runs courses in Australia and overseas destinations and this is her second at Daku. Delia and John Rothnie-Jones, who own the resort, have been running courses since 2004 in subjects as diverse as literature appreciation, painting and bird watching.

This year they are also including painting, singing, beading, snorkelling and marine life and yoga workshops on the agenda.

Daku Resort offers friendly, no-frills accommodation, which in some ways makes it easier to concentrate on the craft of writing.

The lush gardens and gorgeous views through the coconut palms help play on the senses, another aspect of the course.

As I arrive earlier than the other five members of the group, Delia takes me on a boat trip across the bay where we swim and collect shells. That evening the group arrives, looking a bit worse for wear. They’ve flown from Sydney to Nadi and then Suva to Labasa followed by a hairy taxi ride across the mountains to Savusavu.

Air Pacific assures us that when its two new TwinOtter aircraft arrive in June it will resume frequent services to Savusavu and other islands from Nadi andvisitors won’t be faced with cancellations
and mountainous taxi trips (although I do enjoy the ride on the way back).

The next morning we get stuck into the first of our daily three-hour lessons conducted in an open-air room overlooking palms and sea that Delia says is the only ‘‘custom-built yoga shala in the south Pacific’’.
We are working on a variety of books on very different themes: a memoir, a historical novel, a war history-cum-memoir  and three contemporary novels, including mine.

I am pleased to see the other writers have similar problems to mine. They have their stories, characters and themes worked out, but are stuck and none has a completed manuscript. A couple have some trepidation about reading to the group, but we all find the encouragement gentle and genuine. And breaking into pairs to work on mapping plots and themes is also helpful.

Cornall’s aim is to help you focus on what’s swirling around in your mind, access it and get it down on paper in your own voice. She uses meditation and creative visualisation; yoga on a few mornings as well as swimming and snorkelling also help, giving us time to think (or not think), as does the solitude and
peace of writing in a bure.

After a daily 6pm reading session together, we have group dinners with other guests at Daku; meals are simple but substantial with all meals included in the week-long course’s cost.

I’ve had a few distractions since returning home but I’ve almost completed another chapter and I’ve made a big decision: this book is definitely not chick-lit. The course has given me the breakthrough I needed.

Jan returns to Fiji in 2012 for another week of Breakthrough Writing from 17 – 24 March, 2011.
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Writers Get Creative Amid Palms in Fiji – News article from Yahoo!7

When you get off the plane in Fiji the first thing you notice is the way people walk. It’s the slow relaxed gait of people from a tropical clime. There’s no point in hurrying and besides it’s just too darned hot. The rush, rush of our city-folk ways seems suddenly ludicrous and as you begin slowing it down, you remember this is the pace human beings are supposed amble along at.

It is just the kind of advice writers need. We think we have to push, push, push, to get our work out there, but first we need to slow it down to below the beat of our heart. Daku Resort in Savusavu Bay on Fiji’s second island Vanua Levu, is just the place to do it. This sleepy little backwater with only one main street doesn’t know the meaning of traffic jam or deadline. It’s all ‘rubber time’ here and so it should be in a writer’s world. That doesn’t mean we slack off or don’t turn up to the morning workshop, but in a week of breakthrough writing, we let time stretch out so there’s room for everything.

If you begin the day with yoga stretching high up in the open air yoga shala, with a million dollar view over a palm frond framed, tranquil bay, somehow you know it’s going to be a good writing day. Replacing the yoga mats with a big table and a bunch of determined writers who need a little bit of help, is always rewarding for me. I’ve come armed with a bagful of tricks, devious methods for helping them get ‘doubting mind’ out of the way and let the writing do its thing. I’m taking them into sense memory via guided meditations, getting out the butchers paper and coloured pens, making them plan the cover of their book, the blurb on the back, quotes by famous people, foreword, dedication, publisher’s name and date of publication. ‘Just pretend’ I tell them when they give me the ‘but I can’t possibly do that’ look. ‘Make it up – that’s what writing is, isn’t it?’ In no time all the ‘is it worth it, can I do it, will anyone want to read this crap’ self talk dissolves into the frangipani air and we are into our first mapping exercise and ‘show and tell’ to the group. Immediately we are all taken with the potential of one another’s work, offering constructive feedback, advice, ideas and applause.

There is great power in the group process, for as every day our contribution to our fellow writers grows so does their confidence. As the days wear on the breakthroughs begin to happen. One writer after nine years finally gets her opening paragraph and a brilliant one it is too. Another (after lunch) strips a twenty thousand word prologue down to one thousand. A third finds her narrator voice, a fourth starts out with a ‘maybe short story’ and realises she has enough material for a novel. A fifth is encouraged to include an important strand another writing group disapproved of. And so it goes until by the end of the week these writers who have achieved so much marvel are feeling so relaxed all they want to do now is write.

Jan returns to Fiji in 2012 for another week of Breakthrough Writing from 17 – 24 March, 2011.
Read more here »

Writers Get Creative Amid Palms in Fiji – News article from Yahoo!7

We’ve just had the first of this year’s courses – Island Writers Lab with Jan Cornall – and what a terrific week it was. It was small – we’re seeing the effects of the economic downturn, just like everyone else in the travel business  – but enormously productive. Those writers sure did write! They’d stop for lunch, maybe have a massage or a swim, and then back to the keyboard or writing pad for another thousand words before dinner.

Jan says they were the most disobedient group she’d ever had – always doing their own stuff rather than the things she set them, going off on tangents, arriving late, arguing – but wonderful in their enthusiasm, dedication and good humour. And by the end of the week she’d whipped them into some sort of shape and we held a formal reading of the work.

At the time, we had a lot of guests at the resort who were on their way to the Tony Robbins’ Life Mastery course at nearby Namale Resort (it’s a one week course about getting your head and body and thus your life into focus, and a lot of the participants arrive a day or two early and stay around Savusavu: we had 15 staying). Eight of them sat with us for the reading, and gave us an invaluable outsiders’ reaction to what was being presented- laughing, clapping and even weeping.

In brief, we had
–    a summary of a memoir the daughter of a Czech spy who worked as a double agent for the CIA
–     a travel yarn which was a very funny account of mature age travel – a sort of On the Road with Two Game Grey Ladies
–    a short story about the lunatic edges of writing courses
–     and a totally absorbing account of a terrible car accident 25 years ago, read out from her wheelchair by the woman who was the driver.

During the week we had time for some snorkelling, some walking, some drinking, some shopping (I personally never thought there was much to find in Savusavu – until I went shopping with Hilary!), some local culture – and endless talks around the dinner table. A great week to start the year’s Paradise Courses programme .