California

Searching for writing retreats in California usually means one of two landscapes: the fog and redwoods of the north, or the long quiet of the coast. The state's retreats tend to be small, residential and manuscript-centered, built for writers who arrive with pages and leave with a clearer book.

Lit Camp and the Northern California Writers' Retreat both sit in the Bay Area, and both build their sessions around manuscript work rather than lectures. That separates them from the closest sibling tags: Texas and Florida retreats tend to run larger and flatter, while New York and Massachusetts lean toward publishing-industry programming. Here the day is quieter, and the coast and the redwoods do part of the work. If you are drafting a novel and want readers who will argue with it, these two are the California answer.