Your Paris Story: A Private Writing Retreat in the City Where More Great Books Were Written Than Anywhere Else on Earth
Three Days. One Story. The City That Has Been Waiting to Help You Write It.
There is a reason writers come to Paris.
It is not the cafés, though the cafés help. It is not the light, though the light is unlike the light anywhere else. It is something harder to name — a quality of permission that the city extends to people who are trying to make something true. Paris has always been the city where you are allowed to be in the middle of something. Where the unfinished manuscript, the half-formed idea, the story that will not yet resolve is not an embarrassment but a credential.
Hemingway was in the middle of something here. Baldwin was in the middle of something. Simone de Beauvoir spent decades in the middle of something in this city, and the middle of something produced The Second Sex and The Mandarins and a philosophy of existence that changed how half the world understood what it meant to be free.
You are in the middle of something too.
You may not have named it yet. You may be carrying it as a sense of urgency without a form, an itch without a location, a story that keeps starting and stopping because the beginning is wrong or the frame is wrong or you have not yet found the sentence that makes everything else make sense.
Three days in Paris, with the right structure and the right guide, can change that.
What is Your Paris Story?
A private three-day writing retreat — for one person, or for two people who are working on separate projects — in which Peter de Kuster guides you through the process of finding, shaping, and beginning to write your One Great Story.
Not a writing workshop in the conventional sense. Not a course on craft or structure or technique. A guided biographical excavation — using the Hero’s Journey framework as the analytical tool — that identifies the story only you can tell, the voice only you have, and the first three thousand words of the manuscript that has been waiting to be written.
The three days are structured around the three phases of the Hero’s Journey that every writer must pass through before the story becomes real:
Day One — The Call and the Refusal What is the story you have been called to write — and why have you been refusing the call? Not the idea you think you should write about. The story that follows you. The story that arrives uninvited in your mind at inconvenient moments. The story that you are slightly afraid of — not because you cannot write it but because writing it would require you to admit something about yourself that you have not yet been ready to admit.
Peter works with you for three hours in the morning — in a café or a garden or a quiet salon — asking the questions that locate the story. In the afternoon, you write for three uninterrupted hours. In the evening, you read what you wrote to Peter, and he tells you honestly: this is where the story is. This is where you stopped it from being the story it needs to be.
Day Two — The Descent Every story has a place where the writer has to go deeper than is comfortable. The scene that is hard to write because it is true. The character whose perspective requires you to understand something you would rather not understand. The moment that the story turns on — and that the writer must be willing to go into without knowing in advance what they will find there.
Day Two is devoted to that scene. Peter stays with you through it — not directing, not editing, but present. Sometimes the most important thing a guide can do is simply be there while someone goes somewhere difficult.
Day Three — The Return The story exists now, in the beginning of its form. Day Three is devoted to understanding what you have made — the shape of it, the voice of it, the scene that is already working and the three places where it will need the most attention in the next draft. Peter writes you a Story Brief — two pages that map the structure of what you have begun, identify the Hero’s Journey stage of each section, and name the dramatic situation at the heart of your story.
You leave Paris with three thousand words, a Story Brief, and the clear knowledge of what you are writing and why. That knowledge is worth more than a year of writing courses.
The locations:
Writing sessions take place in locations chosen for their relationship to the story you are working on. A memoir of a professional life might be written in the courtyard of the Palais Royal. A story of transformation might begin in the reading room of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. A story of loss might find its first words on a bench in the Tuileries Garden.
Paris is not the backdrop for this retreat. It is a collaborator.
Who this is for:
Writers who have been circling a story for years and have not yet found the way in.
Professionals who know they have a book in them — a memoir, a novel, a collection of essays — and who need three days of total focus and the right guide to find out what it is.
Anyone for whom the combination of Paris, three uninterrupted days, and a framework that takes their story seriously is exactly the permission structure they have been waiting for.
Investment: € 2.450 per person — including all three sessions with Peter, the written Story Brief, and the afternoon consultation on Day Three. Accommodation and meals not included. Available year-round, by advance arrangement. Maximum one retreat per month. Contact Peter: peterdekuster2023@gmail.com
Paris gave Hemingway his voice. Baldwin his clarity. De Beauvoir her freedom. Three days is enough to find out what it gives you.