Room lit with artificial light, in a basement with no distractions? OR a desk in front of a window looking out over the sea?
Where do you like to be to write or learn or both? I am fairly allergic to the former, if I am honest and yet I worked in a room for over five years which had no external window and came out alive! My environment is critical to my productivity or is it? It is definitely hugely important to my happiness and I think I need happiness to be higher in my list of requirements than productivity.
In reality, the happier we are, the more effective we are to everyone else around us and I think we have to ask ourselves “Are we measuring productivity correctly?” However, let me stop myself there because I didn’t set out today to talk about productivity like I was a defective Government Minister lecturing the business community. What I want to explore is how, given the choice, we pick our working environment as writers and when we choose to do the work once we are in that environment.
I am not sure I have got this element of my life right yet and this fills me with some embarrassment as I have quite a bit of life under my belt now, so really I should have this pinned. I am, as always being hard on myself because, if I go back to those Government Ministers, we have been told what we should do and when from an early age and never really been allowed to work it out for ourselves. I could even get into a bit of parent shaming here but I think that would be unfair, in most cases, because they will have been brainwashed by previous ‘Leaders’. They legally have to send us to school after all.
So here I am, trying to work out where I should write and when after far too many years not really thinking about it. “Where do you work?” is a question nearly always asked of authors being interviewed on their book tours. Ruby Wax talks about going to a small shed in her publisher’s garden and I recently read that Margaret Atwood finished her novel ‘The Heart Goes Last’ on the top floor of a book shop (The Book Hive) in Norwich in a private writing booth. Christobel Kent can’t write her detective novels based in Florence when she is actually in Florence and yet Sarah Winman wrote a good part of her book Still Life in the British Institute of Florence’s library because she wanted to be in Florence whilst writing about it. There doesn’t seem to be a rule that we can all follow.
Great! I like this because this means I have to make my own mind up. I have to figure it out and there are no set of rules dictating what we should do. We have to use that creative brain which we have worked so hard to shut down. I am currently typing away on a lap table in my caravan. It isn’t the most comfortable place I have worked but I have seagulls accompanying my tapping and a Border Terrier pup snoozing on my feet. If I am honest, I like a bit of distraction and I like to stare out of the window every know and again as I cogitate. You will also be pleased to know that there is a family building THE MOST ENORMOUS tent on the next pitch to us which we suspect will house acrobats and clowns when it is finished! Distracted again eh!
The other question I pose today is when should I write? Well you won’t be stunned to hear that this also has no rules. Some “just have to write when I get up with the monks at 4.30am” (I am sure they don’t mention monks but I like the drama of it). Others write into the small hours of the night probably going to bed when they see the monks with the other writers emerging for their shift.
I think there is something in establishing a writing routine but for most of us this is a dream which is unattainable. The best I can do is look at each day’s schedule and figure out when I can get to my journal and when I can do some other writing. I hear many authors saying that the most important thing is to write everyday and I think this is the key. If you have a life when you can write at a time that works for you then a. I am jealous and b. good on ya. For the rest of us perhaps we can plan a weekly schedule. As a sports coach, this works for me. My training plans are worked out day by day. They are often dictated by the facilities I have available combined with the time athletes can attend. Writing, for those of us with many other facets to our lives needs to be managed into our schedule but manage it we must! Don’t leave it to chance or your writing time will be stolen by some other ‘important’ task which just has to be done or perhaps watching your neighbours build a tent?
So I leave you with the following advice:
- Book your writing space and time at least a week in advance (perhaps a library if you are doing research or your knee if you are just scribbling)
- Work out what sort of space works for you and create it as often as possible
- Plan a writing ‘programme’ into your week and stick to it – just like you would go to your yoga class or book club
- Don’t panic if all you have is an underground cell to work in – remember you can go anywhere you want in your mind.