Writing Pad - Writers' Rooms and Other Spaces

And these spaces are other. Writers really go in for odd places. There might be a shed and outdoorsiness. There might be some repurposed room in a house or old car garage or narrowboat or something. That’s if they have a set space. Transient, footloose writers might start typing or scrawling anywhere, and in different conditions.

Despite the concentration-less days, where adherence to even the most anal retentive writing set up still can’t inspire copy, when it does hit it can hit anywhere. Keys get pounded while pub strangers bellow around the writer’s ears. A scribe who likes fuck heavy and fuck loud music and umpteen coffees as they work might write half a novel in total parched silence. 

That’s how it goes. You only need your routine when you’re out of it.

But those rooms, man. David Lodge with his ever so neat long desk and neatly filed book materials. Virginia Woolf with, yes, her garden shed and great bottle of green ink. Will Self using neat grids of post it notes to construct a novel and its narrative idea by idea. The spaces are museum pieces; you can go and see Raymond Chandler’s desk, Faulkner’s, Hemingway’s. Oh Hemingway’s – there’s a photo of him at a desk full of letters with a cat tiptoeing through the lot.

Of course the desk space is an outsider’s question. It’s fans and casuals looking in. Watching the interview. If you like a book, song, stage/screen performance, painting... there’s this tendency to find biography of the personnel involved fascinating. If you know what an actor’s/writer’s/musician’s life is like then you can see where the performance comes from, or the book from the author or song from the… You think maybe seeing the writers’ rooms and desks or whatever they used will show you the interface where the books appeared. If there hasn’t been a documentary programme where they show an author’s brain patterns as they start to type then there will be.

But that’s like trying to see life in the meat of the body. You can’t see how it feels. If Stephen King wants to write books set in the places he’s living in, with characters doing things he’s done, that’s fine. But don’t expect to understand exactly how or why the things make the copy, or what he thought about these things when he started putting them down.

It’s not about biography. You can’t look at a writer’s desk and see how the ingredients make the book. They are getting in there, though. All of this stuff gets looked at, or looked right through, when the author is conjuring and remembering feelings and ideas to paint around the narrative of the book.

They mentally collate anecdotes and thoughts and vivid and not so vivid memories and put them into characters, or at least use them to inform the same. Ditto mannerisms, plot lines, descriptions of the houses, the streets, the airport changeovers, what you get on the floor of a forest, the smell of the car on the school run… While they’re doing all this they are staring and yet not looking at the writing space they’re in. The rainy day half-light hitting all around the room; or maybe hot sunshine shifting the colours of everything… it’s all in their awareness.  And this is something they can do, rather than something they prefer. It’s just where their brains go, wherever they are.

So why the deliberate space? Why the processes? Roald Dahl with his writing plank on his lap and pot of sharpened HBs. Enid Blyton and her 6,000 words a day (Stephen King again has something similar going on).  Maybe it’s trying to tap the magic. If you rub all the right bits together on a slow day then maybe you’ll get a bit more fire, a bit more genius copy, than you would by waiting for it to come naturally.  If you sit in the space with your specific edition of the OED or Roget’s thesaurus and your pot of Bics and your lucky arrowhead and… then maybe you’ll be able to extract all the more words for it when the inspiration hits.

And maybe it’s just habit. If your working life is spent in a fixed, unmoving position while your brain takes you through universes of thought then perhaps the external space is better off being fixed in its details. Because that’s not really where the action is, or where the writer’s focus is. If they always wore the same jumper what autumn when they were penning blah then it may well look like their ‘writing jumper’ but really it was just the jumper that was there each day when they tossed on some clothes and sat down to write. If you’ve got your own little world exploding out of your head you grab what you can and sit down at the keyboard, surely. So perhaps two thirds or more of a writer’s habitual space is not habitual so much as ignored – neglected. They just forget to move things in the business of thinking and writing. The rest is the stuff they keep to hand to help them get the thoughts down quickly enough.

It’s like a university tutor giving you, to keep, a book from their shelves. You feel like you’ve got a crucial jenga piece; they’d just forgotten to throw it out.

Face it, every time you go to an author’s space and the National Heritage curator tells you what an inspiring view they had out of the window when they were writing Blah just remember: the whole time they were writing the best passages of Blah the only thing they could ‘see’ in front of them as a piece of paper.