When my team set up our company in 2023, none of us had ever owned a business before. We knew we were good at developing writing, we had proof of this in the form of books that we had worked with, books that had won great big prizes, books that had made authors household names. This formed the narrative of the first iteration of our website - our credentials, the success of the authors we’d worked with, the prestige of the authors we were inviting as guest speakers to our masterclasses – experiences that took place in two extraordinary and inspirational locations.

Like some of the exchanges described by the Techlab participants, I was at an event when someone asked me what the participants get from doing our writing course. After some thinking I concluded that we help people write better. 

In that moment I realised the importance of telling potential participants what we can do for them. On our website, we shifted the weight from ourselves to the participants. We are industry insiders, we said, who can share with you the ways in which writers conceive, construct and complete their stories. This was our first real step towards a coherent narrative. 

In an experience that echoes the Techlab’s learnings, as our participants told us what they got out of the masterclasses, our website copy got better, clearer and more confident. For instance, several told us about having felt isolated in their writing process but now had a sense of community, so we placed more of an emphasis on it in the masterclasses and celebrated this on the website. We created writing groups for participants to stay in touch long after leaving us. Some of them told us that their time with us rekindled their joy in their creative process and that this was more important to them than the end product, so we dialled back a bit on our copy being all about being published and talked about connecting with a love of creativity.  

Today we are in our third year of running Silk Road Slippers and while we can now fill up most of our classes, I now understand that it’s a constant evolution. 

Recently we were invited to give a workshop as part of a literature festival. The people who attended were really inspiring and as we wrapped up, we pitched our retreat in Marrakech. 

I realised that we were telling these people that we would help them find their voice and to write the book they’d always wanted to write but that in doing so, we were still trapped in an idea of our participants being or wanting to be “professional” writers. Our good intentions might be getting in the way of making our masterclasses more valuable.

I thought of our three years of former participants and how several of them were writing books – some had completed them – and how several of them weren’t. Those participants had used their time with us to discover their voice, and the power of creative self-expression. They took this confidence and used it to communicate with greater clarity and honesty – from stories to website copy to presentations at work. These may not have been ways we’d anticipated or intended our writing retreat to be useful but this was what was happening.