Where Do You Write?

© by Cathrene Gehue, 2008.

Many months ago, I came across an intriguing little quiz at Holly Lisle’s website. Holly is a published author with many novels to her name, most of which seem to fall into the fantasy genre. Her website is part promotional tool for her own work and part resource for other writers. It’s her way of “paying forward” with her knowledge about the writing process and the publishing industry.

The quiz is called Are You Right for Writing?, a short multiple choice questionnaire for helping to evaluate the extent of your writing passion. Today’s article is inpsired by question #9, which is: “Where is the weirdest place you have ever written?”

This may seem like an odd question to ask. Surely the best best place to write is at a computer on a desk; anywhere else is just weird! Well… that’s the point of the question: to put aside any discomfort or fear and explore weirdness–all those things that are different and strange and not easily understood.

Normally, I do my best to write whenever, wherever. Over the last several months, I’ve been enjoying the freedom of owning a laptop instead of a desktop computer. With a laptop, the wherever is more flexible than ever.

With freedom to roam with my new toy, I experimented. I tried sitting crosslegged on the bed with the laptop in front. After a while, sitting this way loses its comfort factor and its zen. If you can endure the ache in the legs, which I did, eventually your legs stiffen, staying in preztel asana no matter how hard you try to pry them apart.

For quite a while (and still occasionally) I sit on the couch. This is where I first became acutely aware of my shortness. With my feet dangling from the edge of the seat and the weight of the laptop pressing on my legs, lack of circulation brought about a tingling sensation in the feet.

I’ve also tried sitting on a barstool at the island in our kitchen, which has no back support–emphasis on NO back support. Again, this proved not a good place for writing for any great length of time, yet it was a high place which imparted a feeling of authority and regality.

And then there was the red chair, the kind that you sink back in. It’s low to the ground so your feet don’t dangle. It’s slightly reclined with a hammock style seat and back so it molds to the shape of your body. As long as there’s no need for a desk, it’s a perfect place to write.

However, none of these places are weird.

The other places in which I’ve written are classics for writers. On busses and subways. In restaurants while dining alone or waiting for friends. Coffee shops. In bed, with pen and paper, nodding off in mid sentence. I even wrote a draft for a novel on breaks and lunches at my workspace in the Receiving Department while working in National Book Service’s warehouse.

Again, not so weird.

Answering Holly’s question was proving to be quite a challenge. Eventually, I found myself going back in time, to when I was a kid. Then suddenly it came to me, the memory of a weird place where I wrote.

My bedroom closet.

Normally closets are where monsters are hidden or where skeletons are kept–all those dark, dirty secrets. Closets are for organizing or for keeping a heap of chaos hidden. And yes, it was the weirdest place in which I have ever written. It was also the best.

My bedroom closet wasn’t only home to hangers and clothes, and maybe some blankets and books that didn’t fit on my bookshelf, it had a phonograph player, which my grandfather had bought back in the 60’s. It looked like a box on legs, and when the lid was propped open, it played vinyl at three speeds, 33 1/3, 45 and 78. The radio still worked, but vinyl was my first choice.

The space between the legs of the phonograph became a home for a lamp. And there, in the remaining space on the closet floor, I sat listening to music or writing words or drawing doodles or daydreaming. In this tiny room inside a room, a third and most spacious room opened up: My mind.

That closet was a place where the reality of the outside world and home disappeared. It was the tiniest little space, yet through its limitation not of size but of sensory input, it created the right kind of environment for spinning the creative cogs of the imagination.

So that is the weirdest place in which I have ever written. It doesn’t feel any more or less weird than writing at a desk or in a coffee shop. Now why is that?

Certain places are more conducive to the creative process, such as coffee shops, and some places aren’t, like my balcony which is home to a meddlesome bunch of wasps during the summer. Where a writer writes depends on the writer’s response to stimulus, their need for lots of it or their need to temporarily block out the world.

Writing seems to be a lot like air. When you breathe, you don’t go to just one place to get air, as if it’s only available from a dispenser in the kitchen. Air is everywhere; breathe and its there. Writing essentially can be done everywhere, if armed with pen and paper.

The quality of air changes depending on whether you’re in the city or country, and so too can the quality of writing change depending on the environment it’s written in. So it’s always good to try writing in different places even if they seem really weird. In fact, I seem to have vague memories of reading a book (and writing in that same book) while lying on my stomach beneath my bed.

Where am I writing these days? The laptop doesn’t roam as much around the apartment anymore. It has settled into a little workspace on a wooden desk accompanied by a wooden chair. Since first sketching out the topic for this article, the wooden chair has been upgraded to a comfy Serta leather “manager’s chair”, which is basically a task chair with fancy arms.

It’s not a weird place to write, but it’s the most comfortable and offers the least amount of distractions and stimuli, so that I can write from the one and only truly weirdest place ever–the imagination!

To read Holly Lisle’s questionaire at her website, please click here:
Are You Right for Writing?