… a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.  –Virginia Woolf

My messy room

Lately, like an old dog looking for the perfect place to nap, I’ve been setting myself up to write at various locations around the house. Clearly, my office is no place for a writer. My day job’s constant muttering for attention is too distracting. A few times last week I slid out the little table on the roll-top desk in a corner of the dining room. It’s neat and orderly and the light is beautiful and I was glad for the work that got done there. A corner of my bedroom with its comfy chair and wobbly portable desk works fine for morning coffee and journal writing, and I’ve extended a few of those mornings to include working on the novel there, too. But for some reason, of late I can’t seem to “rise above the setting, with its comforts and distractions” as John Updike told us we must do.

That Updike quote is from the introduction to one of my favorite books about writers and how they work—Jill Krementz’s The Writer’s Desk, which features photographs of 57 writers in their rooms, among them Tennessee Williams, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Eudora Welty, Joyce Carol Oates. The pictures are dramatic black-and-whites that intensify the glamour of the writers and the place they do their work.

Montaigne's Solitarium

And of course, the monks of old had their scriptoriums, holy places where they would go to create their illuminated texts and Montaigne had his Solitarium, with its truths carved into the beams above his head.

I don’t know about you, but I fantasize that if I had the perfect writing place, the writing would come easier. If I had that book-lined room with its view through the trees and the rippling song of the little creek that passed below . . . if I had that wooden deck with its dappled light and napping couch . . . if I had a beautiful writing desk like Virginia Woolf’s with fat peonies in a glass bowl  . . . not only would my writing be better, I’d be a better person, too.

Virginia Woolf's Desk

(insert sigh here)

In workshops I sometimes invite writers to describe their ideal writing space, then compare this dreamed-of niche with their current space. What’s the same? What’s missing? What can you change to bring the real more in line with the wished-for? Writing about this, we can discover what we need to inspire and support us and what makes us feel comfortable and safe. We need to feel safe both psychically and physically to endure the free-fall that writing can be.

This is a good exercise for a writing practice session. Shall we give it 17 minutes?