Where I Write
I write my Morning Pages, my blog posts, and my essays for my Women Rowing North writer’s group here in this room that is part writing room and part guest room. I sit at this bright yellow desk in a chair that belonged to my late mother-in-law, right in front of a south-facing window on the second floor of our home. On the best mornings for writing, the sun pours through the blinds onto my desk. From this window I have seen blue skies, endless clouds, swirls of snow, sheets of rain, and brilliant sun. In the spring I see children playing in the streets, men and women walking dogs, runners checking their time, trees swelling with buds, and scatterings of squirrels. In the summer my view includes my Writing Garden, bursting with purple echinacea, scarlet zinnias, and variegated yellow coreopsis carefully planted for such gazing when I look up from my laptop on draft number two or three. In the fall, leaves blow through the yard and across all the lawns on this small dead-end street. Tree limbs litter the roadsides after windy autumn storms. And in the winter, the snow comes, sometimes gently in giant sparkling flakes, sometimes pelting the windows with icy crystals.
On sunlit mornings, rainy dark-skied afternoons, or shade-drawn evenings, I have written at this desk on my laptop, yellow writer’s notebook nearby, along with my gold-lined folder stuffed with scribbled-on scraps of papers housing illegible ideas that hold a least a snip of a memory of a researched snippet or something I believed sounded brilliant a few days ago. Pens, post-its, and tabbed book quotes fill two trolleys, at hand as needed. Inspiration that doesn’t come from watching out the window often comes from the picture on my desk, a framed watercolor of my childhood home painted by my friend, Lauren. I can look into and out of every one of the windows of that house and be reminded of what is fueling almost everything I write today. And when I need to dig into a book for that certain something needed to strengthen what is still not feeling fully formed, I can sit in my rocker and read and reflect, and then return to my writing.
“You write by sitting down and writing.”
Ahhh…the simplicity of the Malamud quote disguises how much we are influenced by where we write. I didn’t really understand that completely until I decided to get more serious about writing when I retired. I have a beautiful home office, with a large desk, bookcases galore, comfortable chairs, things on the wall that inspire me…but no window. It’s the perfect spot for “working” and served me well when I was working everyday. I would work there nights and weekends, creating everything I needed to be effective and efficient at my job. But that’s not who I am anymore, and the ghosts of a career past seemed to chase away all my creativity. And did I mention there is NO WINDOW! So the guest room, affectionately referred to as the “Bed and Breakfast Room” had to lend some space to my writing goals, and that space had to be right in front of a window. Oh, I can brainstorm or edit at the kitchen or dining room table or even in that office, but my real writing happens at my yellow desk.
Why does where we write matter so much to us? In 12 Ideas For The Best Places To Write, Moriah Costa points out the importance of your writing environment: “Studies have shown that your environment can impact your creativity. Having a peaceful, distraction-free place to write can help you be productive, whether you are a full-time blogger or a first-time author.Writers often overlook having a good place to write, but it can be as important as having an outline.Our brains often associate certain areas with certain activities so going to a place where you write can put you in the right headspace to start typing.”
In Writers and Places: Does Location Matter?, Joe Bunting digs further into how space anchors or inhibits creativity. “Environments affect all people; this has been confirmed in sociological studies of human life, and urban studies in particular. What surrounds us affects how we feel, what we do, what we think and how we channel these thoughts and emotions.”
To put it simply, place affects writing.
“I always work in the morning.... I don’t pace. I just stare out of the window. I have a large window and I can see a field and some woods, and a fence, a stone fence, and I stare.”
There is no end to the places you can write, and you may need to experiment with different environments until you find your own space. Some people love coffee shops, some people love their kitchen tables, and some even prefer to write in bed. Whatever you choose, be true to yourself, keeping in mind what inspires you and what feels limiting. Personally, I am highly distractible. Getting any writing done outside of my home is a challenge. In coffee shops or a library, I have to switch to a notebook and take “writer’s notes:” snippets of dialog and observations, descriptions of something that catches my eye, colors, scents, the way a person moves. Sometimes inspiration will come, and I can jot it down in my notebook.
Dan Blank, in Writing Spaces: Where you Create Matters, suggests thinking of the goals you have for your creative space. It’s a wonderful article that is loaded with advice and inspiration on our need for a creative space. It features interview questions posed to writers and is distilled into 5 goals.The space you claim should:
Provide clarity on what you need to do. (In other words, you may need to develop some focusing routines in your space.)
Remove you from distraction. (I like having a door I can shut. And the window is inspiration, not distraction.)
Incentivize you to create. (Some people like to have a word count, or a task list/outline. I often have a really loose checklist of ideas, quotes, and/or references I want to include.)
Remove all barriers to entry for getting started. (There is nothing in this room or on my desk that interferes with writing (except sometimes the computer itself [looking at you, Amazon]. I open a new tab for whatever piece I am working on.)
Have all the tools you need at the ready. (Whatever isn’t on my desk is in my trolleys. I always have post-its and fast moving pens [thank you Natalie Goldberg].)
So now you have an idea of where I write The Precious Days. If you are looking for more inspiration on where and how writers write, I highly recommend Jill Krementz’s The Writer’s Desk. Published in 1996 by Random House, it is filled with black and white photos (mostly taken in the 70’s) that tell the story of writers in their writing spaces.The contents include a Who’s Who from my days as an English major in the late 70’s at the University of Vermont: Eudora Welty, John Cheever, John Updike, Bernard Malamud, Robert Penn Warren, William Styron, Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, and Saul Bellow to name just a few. If you love to write, are curious to see writers at work, or you just love all-things-writing, this book will captivate you.
All of the photos in this week’s blog are my own.
I’d love to hear about where you do your writing (any kind of writing) and why that space works for you. Use the Comments box below.
