Saint-Exupéry crashed near here and wrote about it. Paul Bowles spent decades in Morocco and produced the most unsentimental desert prose in English. Théodore Monod walked this erg into his nineties and kept notebooks that read like a man arguing with the landscape.
The literary desert has a lot of history and most of the marketing built on it is nonsense. Nobody has ever been made a writer by a dune.
What a place like this can do is much narrower and much more useful: it removes every alternative to working.
The actual proposition
There is no signal. No email, no messages, no research rabbit hole, no checking something quickly. There is also nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no one to meet. A writer at Erg Chegaga in the middle of the day has exactly two options, which are writing and not writing, and after about thirty-six hours most people choose the first because the second becomes unbearable.
That is the whole mechanism. It is unglamorous and it works.
What it will not fix
Four nights of silence will not fix a book that has a structural problem. It will show you the problem more clearly, which is often worse and eventually better.
It will not produce a draft if you do not have an outline. Writers who arrive with a vague intention leave with vague pages. The most productive guests we have hosted arrived knowing precisely which three scenes or four chapters they intended to attack.
It will not fix a block that is actually about something else. Several tutors have told us the desert is unusually good at making that clear, which is not the same as pleasant.
The daily rhythm that works
Groups that get the most out of this settle into roughly the same shape without being told.
Early morning writing, from first light to around eleven. The light is beautiful and cool and it is the most productive block of the day by a wide margin.
The middle of the day off. It is bright and hot even in season and nobody does good work in it. Eat, sleep, read.
Late afternoon session, four until sunset. Shorter, usually for revision rather than new pages.
Evening for reading aloud, or nothing. Groups split evenly on whether to share work. Both are fine.
Tutors running a taught programme usually add one craft session a day, in the flat hours, and keep the writing blocks untouched.
What you need from a venue and should ask about
Power. This is the one that catches people out. Solar power, charged during the day. Laptops need charging and a group of twelve all charging at once needs planning. We can do it and we need to know. Writers who work on paper have no problem at all, and several tutors now insist on longhand for exactly this reason.
A place to work that is not your bed. Ask how many separate quiet working positions exist outside the tents. For a group of twelve you want at least eight, and they should not all be at one long table where somebody’s typing bothers everybody.
A covered space for the flat hours that is not the dining area being reset around you.
Wind. Paper and wind are enemies. There are two or three days a season when outdoor working stops. Ask what the indoor alternative is.
Light for the evening. Candlelight is beautiful and useless for reading a manuscript. We have proper light where it is needed.
Groups, and the size that works
One group at a time, the camp closed to everyone else. Two to twenty guests, though a workshop with any real feedback component works best between six and twelve.
Four nights minimum. Five or six is better for a writing retreat specifically, because the first day is largely lost to arriving and the last morning to leaving, and you want at least three uninterrupted working days in the middle.
October to April.
For tutors and organisers
Send us the group size, dates, whether the retreat has taught sessions or is purely a working retreat, your charging requirement, and whether you need a separate room for one-to-one manuscript sessions. That last one is asked for often and is straightforward if we know.
Related: the silence retreat and the digital detox retreat with no cell service.
