So, the author Chris Ryan and I have been talking about writing spaces. All the photos on my new website are of my office in the house my husband and I built, not including the subfloor and stacked lumber and unfinished drywall and shims and foam insulation where the trim is missing around the windows and boxes of crap we don’t have room to store anywhere else.
That stuff I spared you.
Annie Dillard has written extensively about her writing spaces, both real and imaginary. She says she can’t write with a view, and has gone so far as to deliberately cover a window next to her desk. She also describes the act of writing as cranking a wheel to keep your desk in mid-air among the tree tops.
P.G. Wodehouse wrote one of his best novels interned in a German camp during WWII. Po Bronson wrote his first novel in a closet. Paul Bowles worked in bed, although that was because he was too lazy to get up. Faulkner had a couch in his office, where he would lie and, as he told his daughter, “make up stories.” (Of course, Faulkner also spent a certain amount of his daylight hours recovering from hangovers.) Both Virginia Woolf and Bob Dylan have written extensively standing up—she had a tall desk in the office of the Hogarth Press, and he kept a typewriter on the kitchen counter. Jane Bowles used to write to Paul how she’d sit in a room at a desk all day long and again after dinner and still only come up with two sentences. She also mentioned staring out windows a lot. Some writers say they have to face a wall or they can’t concentrate.
Personally, I can’t write facing a wall. I simply won’t sit down at a desk with nothing to look at.
I don’t think I’d do so hot in an internment camp, either.
I have worked at dining room tables, kitchen tables, coffee tables, a desk in the middle of the room, on the couch, in cars, trains, and airplanes, sitting on the floor against the kitchen cupboards in the middle of the night. I always think of Jean Kerr (Please Don’t Eat the Daisies) describing the contents of her glove compartment because the only place she could get any peace and quiet to write was in her car.
I actually work in armchairs now, on a laptop on my lap. My neck goes out from squinting at the screen these days if I work at a table. In fact, I had to build a small platform on the floor in the U of the beautiful oak desk my husband built for me so I could put an armchair there and still be able to reach the desktop. I also have a great old battered green leather armchair in a dormer window where I can sit in the sun in the spring and fall. In the winter—like now—I tend to sit in a rocking chair downstairs in the living room all day, feeding the fire.
I find writers’ workspaces endlessly fascinating. At the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop one writer took us all to task for even making an issue of it—she said she could write anytime, bus station, train depot, loud dinner table, anywhere, and she thought we were a pretty spoiled bunch of debutants to say we could only write in certain places under certain conditions. I admire her chutzpah, but I have to say I’m guessing she had a hard time finishing a sentence while she was passing the mashed potatoes.
There’s a whole aspect of a writer’s desk that’s about not just writing, but personal space. Even in the tiniest areas, writers find room to decorate, to stash miniature objects of sometimes mysterious significance, to post cartoons and quotes, to hang on the wall those things they most want to stare at while they zone out. (A technical writing friend who works in an office has been telling me this morning how she sits and zones and it looks like work—-we were laughing that if Dawn of the Dead were about writers, they’d trundle off duly with their blue hands outstretched to find keyboards, even with no words in their heads.)
Where do you guys write? Do you ever wonder what you’d wind up with if you tried working someplace really weird? Did you DO it?
