Where do you write?
JA
November 09
Apparently, D.H Lawrence preferred to write outdoors, while UK poet Andrew Motion used to do it sitting on a glass-topped table. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir frequently met and worked at Cafe de Flore and later Les Deux Magots and, similarly, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot and George Bernard Shaw were all said to have been regulars at the Reading Room at the British Museum.
Much has been written on the topic of writers’ rooms (and among these Will Self’s post-it note chaos still remains a favourite of mine), but not a lot has been said about the alternatives. Cafes, libraries, bars, bookshops, parks and public spaces often have the advantage of atmosphere and the people-watching aspect. The environment around you can be great fodder for descriptions, characters and place. But then there’s also the privacy and comfort of a home study or bedroom, or the necessary distance of a separate office or hotel room. What are the pros and cons of different writing spaces, and what do you prefer?
Maya Angelou and Orhan Pamuk have both said they like to write outside of home. Angelou used to hire a hotel room in Winston, where she would remove everything from the walls so that there would just be a ‘Roget’s Thesaurus, a dictionary, a bottle of sherry, a yellow pad and pens’. In a recent interview, Pamuk explained his preference:
I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me… Ten years ago I found a flat overlooking the Bosporus with a view of the old city. It has, perhaps, one of the best views of Istanbul. It is a twenty-five minute walk from where I live. It is full of books and my desk looks out onto the view. Every day I spend, on average, some ten hours there.
Australian author Arnold Zable likes to write in cafes - he frequents many and wrote much of his novel Scraps of Heaven in North Carlton's Paragon Cafe. He claims he enjoys the 'physicality of being out there, surrounded by life and movement' and 'tend[s] to feel claustrophobic working in a room'.
Sonya Hartnett says she does most of her writing in bed (something I think I’d be a huge fan of):
I write on a laptop on my bed, often with coffee and chocolate to help me along. I make notes in the notebook as I go, things that need to be changed, little ideas that come along. I do a few hours in the early morning, then a few hours in the late afternoon. In between, I walk my dog, and think about what I've written in the morning, and how it needs to be fixed in the afternoon.
MJ Hyland does something similar:
Allegedly both Marcel Proust and Mark Twain wrote in bed. But that’s not why, of course, but it’s where I first got the notion. It’s important for me to be comfortable when I write; unlike my characters, who are rarely comfortable. I like being comfortable. I couldn’t write standing up the way Hemingway did.
Steve Toltz, in contrast, is an author who seems be able to write wherever he chooses. According to the Guardian, while writing A Fraction of the Whole in Sydney, he would frequently go down to Bondi beach and write from cafes, libraries, park benches and even the cemetery. Travelling through Paris and Barcelona, he would do the same: ‘The routes I took were always very arbitrary but I also knew that whichever way I went I would write something different in each place I ended up, simply because of what was around me.’
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Comments
09 Nov 09 at 9:53
I usually write at my desk in my home office, overlooking the street, trees overhanging my window. But I actually write better at my home-away-from-home - 'my' room at my Dad's house, which is set up with a big desk and chair, a bed and a couch, and a smattering of books that have collected there over several visits. It's so free of clutter, unlike my room at home. I wonder, too, if its proximity to where I grew up (when I wrote far more freely and prolifically than I do now) has some odd psychological effect on me. Though I'm probably inventing that.
In terms of taking notes and writing ideas, I often tend to do it on trains. I have a journal full of entries beginning, 'I'm on the train to ...'
I love cafes for writing, in terms of the headspace it puts me in, but I always feel compelled to leave after an hour or so, to free up the table, so short stints only.
...09 Nov 09 at 11:45
I usually end up writing at home at my desk, or at work when my boss isn't looking.
Though, I've recently tried cafes and pubs. They're very effective and it's like you're going there to write. So it makes you actually do the work.
I hope to get a chance to try more of it.
...09 Nov 09 at 13:37
On the one hand I write everywhere, noticing, taking notes etc. But for the hard yakka I write in a prison cell which I rent at the Old Fremantle Prison. It's brilliant! Once I slam that door shut, that's it. Securities great. And the irony that what was once someone else's hell is now my heaven never escapes me.
...09 Nov 09 at 18:29
I just submitted an article about famous authors' writing spaces - to come in the next issue of Voiceworks. Here's an excerpt about Safran Foer, who is a library writer:
Jonathan Safran Foer, one of my favourite modern writers, works in the 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library. He chooses to write in the biggest and busiest space, the Rose Reading Room, which is not unlike any of the vast reading rooms of many of Australia’s state libraries. Safran Foer is from the opposite camp to Virginia Woolf or Roald Dahl, opting not to hide away from the distractions and interruptions of life but rather to immerse himself in them. He says he thrives in such semi-chaotic surroundings, where:
“people regularly carry on cellphone conversations at their desks, regularly sing along to the music they are listening to through their earphones (why wear earphones at all?), regularly have conversations (which are regularly about illicit things), regularly fall asleep - apropos of I can't imagine what, a guy at the next table slapped the bookshelf behind him and screamed, "Fucking pussy!" - regularly prepare and eat meals, stare, hum, hoot, and get in scarily heated arguments with the roaming policemen about what's acceptable behaviour.”
i too like to write away from home - cafes and pubs mostly, as long as people will leave me alone but not make me feel lonely.
...11 Nov 09 at 13:47
The fewer distractions the better. One big table and my wall of books and I'm off. I did sit on a seat in the shade at the Melbourne Bot. Gardens yesterday to write until an old man came and sat right next to me imagining I wanted company. He didn't get it. There is safety inside my room.
...12 Nov 09 at 8:33
God and the air know that writing --- something I've been saying to myself lately about that infamous quote attributed to Eliot, that, "mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal!" irks so much, that I would never I'd heard it. Just because a thing is let past the lips or fingers or a thousand before have done it, does not an ethic make --- but to pick up - writing once a novice joy, full of inspiration trotting flat out, seems now, though there is no end of inspiration, an old free-ranger chomping bit and hoofing nervous the ground. As to where: everywhere, anywhere, pleasewhere, all around.
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