In Stephen King’s On Writing – a great memoir, and my favorite book by King — the author poses a problem. He places a vast desk in the middle of a room he has declared to be his office, puts the typewriter on the desk, and pronounces his studio ready for action. Thereafter, he quickly realizes that he doesn’t like writing at his giant desk in his new office, and sets up shop at his old familiar, a card table just outside the laundry room.
I have Stephen King’s problem. I have this great room at the front of the house with a lot of natural light. My bookcases are there. The closet is full of my belongings.
I don’t like writing in that room, though.
Ain’t that a kick in the pants? Having a dedicated office was one of the things I really looked forward to when we were shopping for houses and closing on the one we bought. Then we moved ourselves in and… eh.
The floor in front of the desk is a little uneven, so I have to hold myself in place while I’m sitting at the desk. The office is a bit isolated from the rest of the house, which I thought would be part of its appeal when I staked my claim there, but instead it makes me feel detached and distracted. I haven’t even really finished unpacking it, and a few of the bookshelves are piled with loose junk, wires, etc.
Well, that stinks.
Undaunted, I’ve ordered a netbook, in the hopes of moving around and keeping the creative juices flowing. Of late, I’ve been working a lot in my longhand Moleskine, and I’ve been especially prolific with notes hastily scribbled into the margins. Hastily scribbled notes don’t make for drafts or finished manuscripts, though, so I’m trying to remain flexible.
I chose the netbook specifically because I want bare bones. I got the solid-state hard drive, which is really small, because I don’t want to be dragging around a ton of music. I didn’t want a full notebook because I don’t want full-scale computing. I don’t want games. I don’t even want the Office suite. I just want browsing, e-mail, and something I can use to draft from the couch or the reading room.
It’s a shame about the office. But maybe my wife can put it to some clever use.
For me, I’m finding that the longer I spend in one place, the less the words come. Often it’s enough for me to just move from the desk to the couch and back. For sure, though, I find more and more that the less and less I have around, the better the work I do. Sometime I go and work in the dining room (well, “dining” “room”) just because I can’t distract myself in there with the Internet. My desk faces a wall (mostly). When I go out to write at a coffee shop somewhere, it’s because I get a mix of stimulus from human contact and some enforced isolation because I have to tune out the stimuli with headphones. Whatever works.
I had the opposite problem for a while. When I was freelancing in St. Louis, I had a private office, and loved it. I could mentally tell myself “Okay, I’m going to write now” by walking into the room, hammer on things for a few hours, and then leave. It was easier to turn my writing brain on and off with the physical separation of space. The downside was that Michelle almost never saw me in the evenings.When I moved here, we all moved to laptops instead of desktop computers, so now having an office at all has become pointless — we all sit on the couch in the living room and work. It took me forever to get used to that, but now I’m used to writing there. The few times I need a more “desk-like” experience, I sit at the dining room table and work.
I find nomadic writing to be the most productive. Write in the morning in one place, go to lunch, come back and write somewhere else. If I stay in one place for too long, I’ll latch on to the inevitable distractions there. So, I wander – ideally, from coffee shop to coffee shop, but currently from desk to dining room table to couch.
I’m emphatically a writer who thrives on environment, so I’m interested to see both my tastes for location changing and the point in my life at which they’re changing. I’ve long envied the ability of people like Will and Gareth to be able to shift on the fly, mostly because of my until-now dislike of laptops. I’ve had laptops before and they just always felt underpowered to me, mostly because it sounds like I expected more from them than I actually needed.I also dig Eddy’s situation, in which multiple writers are together, working on separate projects but in the same space. What better way to fire off an idea and get immediate feedback?
I’m going to come across as an old fart, but I prefer to do my writing by hand on a yellow legal pad. I then transcribe my longhand notes onto Ye Olde Wyrd Processor. I have found that my level of focus and creativity is best when writing out something by hand. You see – I *hate* this process, so I tend to be more succinct in my wording. I ramble less. I get to the point faster. Plus a yellow legal pad never runs out of power and is completely portable! I’m giving serious thought to a netbook as well, but I currently prefer my method.
I definitely go in for the nomadic thing. I have a decent enough desk back at home, and some days it works well for me but I find I get my best writing done as I drift between coffee shops. It could have to do with the fact that my desk is in a basement corner and a good part of my writing feels solar powered some days. The Starbucks is never shy on windows, or delicious coffee.
I have gone way too far toward out-of-house nomadism in recent weeks, to the point that I’m scared to try to work at home, which is ridiculous, of course, but these neuroses rules our lives.
If you’re looking for lightweight word processing, might I recommend DarkRoom? It’s a barebones, blank screen word processor. It has no formatting, and no distractions.I’m not really a writer, more of a wannabe (though I plan on participating in NaNoWriMo), but I love it for just writing. Later, I import my writing into Word for light formatting.