Creating A Space For Writing – WN 014

This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 14: Creating A Space For Writing.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am your host, Sarah Werner, and in my hands, I hold a mug, and within this mug is a delicious homemade cappuccino. I posted a picture of this cappuccino on the Write Now podcast Facebook page a little bit earlier, where listener Andrew Coons suggested that I just really go in-depth about the quality of the foam on this delicious cappuccino.

And so, Andrew, I can tell you with some authority that the foam a top my cappuccino here, while made with whole milk, which I’ve heard you’re not supposed to do, but you know what? I don’t care because it is delicious. This foam is both pillow soft and delightfully creamy. It’s almost as if I reached up into the heavens and scooped a handful of suds out of an angel’s bathtub and dolloped it on top of my cappuccino, except instead of soap suds it’s milk suds.

Is that weird? That’s maybe a little weird, but I have to tell you this because I’m super excited about it, because I get super excited about a lot of things, but I made my own espresso today. And even better, I made it in a tiny espressos stove top maker thing that I got for $3.99. I love my cappuccinos and for a while, I was kind of thinking, I know cappuccino makers, like good ones, are $300, $400. If I spend this much on a cappuccino, how many will it take before the machine starts paying for itself? Add in the cost of coffee beans and milk and electricity and all that stuff and, you get the picture. And I really didn’t have $300-$400 bucks just laying around to blow on a very frivolous drink maker. However, while I was at Bed Bath & Beyond returning something, and it feels like I’m always returning something at Bed Bath & Beyond, for whatever reason, I was lured into the clearance section. And I saw these little tiny espresso makers for just under $4 each.

So I bought two of them and you know what? Each one makes one shot of espresso and it is delicious, it is seriously good espresso. And so I figured this thing’s paid for itself and two or three drinks. Oh, and I got a milk frothier but still, I feel like I’ve cheated the system somehow and I love feeling like that. So essentially, I now have the capacity and ability to make my own cappuccinos. I’m creating my own fuel, so look out world this machine is self perpetuating. If you are a fan of coffee, I’m sure you understand my joy. If you are not a fan of coffee, I suggest you develop a taste for coffee. It’s really bad if I crack myself up, clearly, I’ve had too much espresso. In the time since my last podcast, I’ve had a couple listeners send me really lovely thoughts and interesting insights. And I thought I would share a couple of those with you.

Ava Brights: My favorite professor told me once that every paper, story, et cetera, needs a Jesus wept, a short, simple sentence that explains your thoughts without trying. So I wanted to pass on this bit of wisdom to you. I hope you find your simplicity. Ava, thank you so much for sharing this wisdom. Sometimes it’s so easy to get caught up in the complex and we forget that sometimes it’s simply okay to tell a story. There’s a time and a place for this, but that simplicity can be both I think very freeing and extremely lovely. So thank you, Ava. A couple of other listeners wrote about the importance of journaling in their writing lives. Listener Gwen notes. I agree about journaling as being a way of releasing negative energy and allowing myself to get over a situation, which was probably worse in my head than it really was. I agree with that so much, sometimes a little bit of distance and perspective can really help you come back from circumstances or situations which otherwise might bring you down. So I really appreciate that insight.

Finally, listener Brandon noted that journaling has helped him solve a problem with his writing. And I thought this was really helpful. He says, I have a habit where I’m constantly generating new ideas. I love them, it’s great to feel clever, but the problem is that an idea is not a complete story. If I’m only developing new ideas then I’m not completing the old ones, I’ve got tons of foundations, but no houses. I’ve always kept a little flip note pad for ideas with me, but writing them down in it was never enough. But what I found with journaling is that I can take that excitement for new ideas and move it toward being excited about what I need to write tonight. So the idea of a journal as an external thought processing tool, as really a way to separate our ideas from our stories and to relate our stories to ideas and to turn ideas into stories. You see where I’m going with this.

Brandon, Gwen and Ava. Thank you so much for your insights. One thing I love about this podcast and very unexpectedly is that it has put me in touch with all these amazing and cool people. So if you’d like to send me an email, I would love to receive it. You can email me at hello at sarahwerner dot com. That’s S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R.com. Or you can visit that website, navigate to the contact button and send me a message that way. I would love to hear from you. So today’s podcast topic is creating a space for writing, and I’m going to lean a little bit more toward the physical space and talk about how that can affect our writing. Writing is an act of drawing the mental or spiritual, or however you like to think of it, out into the physical world. And I think that the place where we give birth to these stories and ideas is really important. So I wanted to look at the writing spaces of some famous successful writers, at least at first, to find out what makes them special.

I want to start with one of my favorite writers, Jane Austen, who wrote famous, works such as, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, books that you’ve probably read and if you haven’t, you’ve probably at least heard of them. She wrote at the beginning of the 19th century and during the 1808, 1809 period, somewhat shortly before her death. Jane Austen revised the manuscripts of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice and wrote Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion from literally the tiniest table I have ever seen. This table is round-ish, it has 12 sides so it’s roundish, it’s made of wood, it stands upon one center leg, and it could easily be mistaken for a bar stool. But she sat at this tiny table in what looks like an intensely uncomfortable chair, in which to spend any amount of time sitting and writing, and created masterpiece after masterpiece. The room in which this small table and uncomfortable chair are located, has hardwood floors and light walls and it’s located near a window.

Jack Kerouac who wrote, On the Road and other beat classics in the sixties, the 1960s that is, jotted down his own thoughts on the best time and place for writing. Kerouac says, the desk in the room, near the bed with a good light, midnight till dawn, a drink when you get tired, preferably at home. But if you have no home, make a home out of your hotel room or motel room or pad. British author, Roald Dahl was I think a writer very much after my own heart. He believed that you do your best writing when you’re cozy, but he wrote from a room in a shed on his property and he dedicated this shed to writing and only writing. He set everything up so that he’d never have to get out of his easy chair. And from an interview that I’ll link to in today’s show notes, this shed is described as follows, the table near to his right hand, had all kinds of strange memorabilia on it.

One of which was part of his own hip bone that had been removed. Another was a ball of silver paper that he’d collected from bars of chocolate since he was a young man and it had gradually increased in size. You can begin to see, I think if you know these writers works passably well that their writing environments perhaps did not have an effect on these writers works, so much as these writers intentionally created spaces that felt like extensions of their own personalities. There’s a famous picture of Steve Jobs that was actually staged that shows him sitting in a barren room on a hardwood floor with a lamp and a mug and a couple other things. But this is his famous minimalist philosophy expressed in a physical space. So if you’re listening to this podcast from wherever it is you do your writing, be it an office, a bedroom, a dorm room, a library, or if you’re listening while gardening, jogging, commuting, what have you, take a look around you or imagine the space in which you usually write.

Have you made that space an extension of yourself somehow? And perhaps more interestingly, is there anything that you see within your writing space that you can also see within your writing? So as a very literal example, I talked about Roald Dahl, keeping a ball of foil wrappers from chocolate bars that he’d been collecting since his childhood. Perhaps that was the thing that influenced him to write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the Great Glass Elevator. He also later wrote a short work of a fiction for adults called Skin and I wonder if the piece of his own hip bone within view helped to inspire that. Now that’s on a very literal level, so that’s physical object ends up in story. But look at Kerouac’s example, he talks about writing in good light, near his bed, from dusk until Dawn, perhaps with a drink and perhaps out on the road. This is a sense that comes out of his writing, that lovely whimsical mish-mash that is his writing environment, really speaks to the tone of his works.

When I look around my own writing office, which also happens to be my podcasting office, this is a room that I very much had to make do with. If you’ve noticed some interesting sounds during my podcast, it is because we live on a busy street on a hill and so regardless of the season or the quality of their muffler on their car or motorcycle, people love to just flow it as they zoom up this hill. We also live in the flight path of the helicopter that takes people to the hospital, lots of sounds. I did have some say in creating this space though, you can’t always choose where you’re working from. So if you’re writing from a dorm room, I really doubt that you decided that you wanted to live in a space where the walls look like they’re made of white painted cinder blocks, with a crappy linoleum tile floor. And in my dorm room, at least we had beds that pulled out of the wall.

So maybe yours is a little bit nicer than that, but maybe it’s not, I really doubt that that’s your place that you chose to write, but you can make it your own and infuse it with the things that bring out the characteristics that you want to bring out when you’re writing. So for me, we have a Habitat for Humanity Store near my house and so I went there and I found this really lovely old teacher’s desk. And it looks like it’s fairly old, but I got it for $2 and it’s wood and metal and it has drawers that lock and a giant broad surface for writing. I’ve painted the walls pale yellow, to stimulate creativity, and I’ve put filmy white curtains over the windows so that I get light, but I don’t have to look out at the busy street outside. I have a bookshelf with all of my top 10 favorite books on it, as well as any reference books I thought might be useful.

I have a computer, but I have it situated so that I can easily slide out of the way so that I can hand write, which is probably my favorite way of writing. I have a desk lamp so that I always have access to good light, I have a typewriter that I got from a garage sale. I have a painting I did in art class, I have a brass birdcage that’s empty that hangs from the ceiling. I have an old piano from my husband’s grandmother, but most importantly, all around me on every surface I have plants. Growing up I shared a bedroom with my two sisters, Rachel and Rebecca, my sister, Rachel had the gift and presumably still does of a green thumb. And so growing up our room was always full of Rachel’s plants. I think that somewhere along the way, I began to equate plants with a sense of home and belonging and comfort.

Because I love plants, I love having them around me, they’re inspiring and beautiful, I love to watch them grow, even though they don’t grow very well under my care because I am a terrible gardener, but it’s still something that is essential for me to have around when I’m writing. Finally, I have two mugs on my desk, one full of mechanical, Bic number two pencils, the other full of pens. I like to keep these mugs full, even though I will never ever go through this many pens and or pencils in one writing session. But what this does is it alleviates the anxiety of scarcity that I might feel if I had less pens and pencils available. So what does my writing area say about my work or how does my personality that manifests itself in my office, in my writing environment? How does that come out through what I write? How does it echo what I’m creating? What are my tones and themes?

So I grew up in Cleveland and currently I live on a busy street where there are constantly cars and city noises outside of my window. But inside, I’ve tried to create a bright sanctuary, a garden, a terrarium for ideas and that comes out a lot in my written work. Most things I write are set in a city or an urban setting and they’re often crumbling settings, where plants are growing up through the cracks or where the character has a small garden all to him or herself, where the color green is very prominent and nurturing and new life are themes. I’m also mildly obsessed with light. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I chose this pale golden color for the walls of my office and the foamy white curtains for the windows. My windows face West and so when the sun sets in the evening, my office lights up like the inside of the sun and darkens very quickly again when the sun sets.

The quick transition from such beautiful light to such overwhelming darkness is another theme that I’ve noticed in my own work. Now I could keep going and talk about my empty brass birdcage that hangs from the ceiling and what that might symbolize, et cetera, or my drawer full of M&Ms or my books or my computer that is so easily pushed aside. But what I want you to do is think about the influence that you’ve had on your writing space. Think about what you’ve chosen to put there, think about what inspires you in your writing space and whether it’s the color of the walls or certain objects arranged on the desk, or even the specific keyboard that you have attached to your computer. Whether it’s the view from your window, the pile of books at the corner of your desk, the glow of the lamp, the smiling faces of friends and photographs. What physical manifestations of your writing have you arrayed around your writing space?

So I have this office that I’ve created for myself and I like the things that are in it. Not that material items are what’s important here, I want to establish that. If you’re a minimalist and you write minimalist works and all you have is a white wall and a desk, then that is awesome. And you can probably concentrate better than I ever could. I’m trying to figure out how I want to say this, but I’ve created this tiny little retreat for myself in which I can be alone, but even though I’m an introvert as opposed to an extrovert, so someone who draws their energy from being alone and in private rather than out and about in the crowds. Even though I’m an introvert, I write better when I’m not alone and this is another aspect of your writing environment that I want to talk about. And that is what happens when you write away from the space that you’ve created for yourself.

I used to have trouble writing in college because my desk and my bed were essentially touching. My bed pulled out of the wall and bumped against my desk and so when I was writing papers or short fiction or whatever it was I was writing my bed was always there calling me to take a nap or just snuggle under the covers and read a book for fun instead of the textbooks I was supposed to reading. Relax, it said, write later. And so in college I would go to the library to write and I would find a little corner surrounded by books and there’d be people milling around and I would plug in my laptop and I would write. And I was very productive in that setting. So I think I learned to write in a transient mode, by which I mean, I got used to being mobile. I got used to being comfortable writing from place to place.

After I graduated from college, I moved to Chicago where I lived for two years and my apartment didn’t have internet. Yes, it was back in those days. And I often needed the internet to do research because at the time I was writing a historical novel. And so I got very used to going from coffee shop to coffee shop. There was even a hooker lounge in there that had 24 hour internet access that I could write from. And I’d put in my headphones and listen to soft lyric list music, beneath the undercurrent of people murmuring and plates clattering, and espresso makers espresso-ing. And I think it’s interesting that even now I feel like I write better or I write more productively when there are people milling around, not necessarily watching me because that’s creepy, but having people around makes me feel accountable and it keeps me focused on what I’m doing, even though I’m an introvert, I know, I don’t get it.

So sometimes when I come home from work, I sit down in my office and I get antsy and I can’t write here. But when I go somewhere else to write, when I make the intentional move to a spot for the dedicated purpose of writing. So I go to a coffee shop or I go to my office at work, because I have a key to the building, which is nice. I feel like I’m much more dedicated to producing writing. I recently went with my husband Tim, to St. Louis, where we spent some time with his grandparents and the place we were staying, had a beautiful garden. And I had brought my laptop with me on a whim, I hadn’t expected to do any writing. But one evening when it was raining, I dragged an arm chair over to a patio door and I watched the rain fall over the garden and I wrote 2000 words and it was more than I had written in weeks, if not months. And it was a place that I’d never been before. So what is it that calls to us in places like that?

I don’t know if this is necessarily a feeling that’s familiar to you, but if you’ve ever just been in a place at the right time, in a place that you haven’t curated or created for yourself to write, but you’ve just had a very, just happy accident of stumbling across the perfect situation. What was that for you? For me, it was that arm chair at that time of evening, looking out over that garden. One more story about writing away from home. Last year, I had decided to take a writing Hermitage. So what I did was I rented a tiny one person cabin in the woods in Northern Minnesota and I brought with me my pencils and my pens, my note pads and my laptop, a bottle of wine and a bag of M&Ms and a whole lot of coffee. And when I got there, I prepared myself to do the most writing that I had ever done. There was no internet out there, the desk looked out over just the woods. I was like, Oh man, this is going to be perfect.

So when I arrived, I was tired for my journey, it was maybe about 4:00 PM. So I decided to just lie down and rest a while. I did not wake up again until the next morning and when I woke up, I was so sick. I was sicker than I had ever been. And so I was in that cottage for three days. And for three days I was violently ill. And I was so disappointed because I had set aside this time to be productive and to write. And I had rented this cabin and it was supposed to be so perfect, but my body had chosen that time to just collapse on itself. So sometimes no matter what we do to curate our writing space, to create, to intentionally and thoughtfully and painstakingly create the absolute best optimum place that we can in which to write, sometimes the writing doesn’t cooperate. That was hard for me to realize and internalize, but that’s okay.

Ultimately, I believe in balance and so for everyday at that Hermitage that I could have spent writing and was instead puking my guts out, in an outhouse no less, hopefully for every one of those days that I lost, I gained a day unexpectedly at a garden in St. Louis or in the basement of a friend or in a coffee shop on a rainy afternoon on a pure whim. This week’s book of the week is a young adult novel called, Graceling by Kristin Cashore. At least I think it’s pronounced Cashore, or it might be Cashore. C-A-S-H-O-R-E. It’s a young adult fantasy novel published in 2008, which is the same year in which The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins was published. And I mentioned that because I noticed some similarities between the books, for example, in The Hunger Games, the protagonist’s name is Katniss and in Graceling the heroine’s name is Katsa.

Both are teenage girls with extraordinary gifts, both are told from a somewhat nontraditional female point of view or voice, in which the character is somewhat distanced and cold and rational and not all Mooney and heart struck, like in a lot of young adult literature. Both deal with being very protective of a small child and both go into great detail about the killing that each character is willing to do or forced to do. Both characters are essentially forced to kill or murder by people who are vastly more powerful and wealthy than they are. And I think both books deal with the taking back of personal control and freewill from corrupt overarching enemies. I liked Graceling, at least I liked it about three fourths of the way through. One of the greatest strengths of this book is its love story, which I know it has a strong female character, it shouldn’t need to rely on a love story, but it has a good love story. And so for what that’s worth, it’s very charming and very sweet.

Both characters are interesting and say interesting things and so it’s not just your typical Edward Cullen as a brooding vampire and everyone wants him. So the heroes and heroines both have appealing characteristics and fun dialogue, and they’re both smart and witty and so it makes it, Graceling as a fun reading. But without giving you any spoilers, the romance is resolved about three fourths of the way through the novel, leaving the last fourth of the novel sort of empty feeling. For those of you who are familiar with Gaming, there’s essentially a large escort mission in the last quarter of the book that feels out of place because the rest of the novel is so quickly paced and well connected and with very smooth transitions. And then I feel like the ending is just sort of tacked on.

So if I had only read three fourths of this book, I would heartily recommend it to you. But boy, I just, I struggled with the last quarter of the book because the author had established this as a slow building romance. And I was like, Oh, I can get on board with this and then that expectation changed in the last quarter of the book. And suddenly it’s an escort mission and it doesn’t really fit. But perhaps that’s just me, perhaps I was in a cranky mood when I read the last quarter of the book. If you have differing ideas, let me know. And if you enjoy young adult fantasy literature with a strong female protagonist who struggles with killing, if that appeals to you, I’d suggest that you give it a try. In closing today, I would like to thank official rad dude and Patreon supporter Sean Locke, for his generosity, as well as my other Patreon supporters for helping to keep my podcast afloat. I truly appreciate it.

I would also like to thank my husband, Tim, who unfailingly and unceasingly supports me and is willing to keep quiet and or evacuate the house when I’m recording. So Tim, thank you so much. Thank you also to my podcast mastermind group, you guys are smart and I like working with you. Finally, thank you for listening, it means so much to me that you are willing to use a little bit of your precious free time to listen to me ramble about writing. I would love to hear from you and I would love to hear how your writing environment or a space that you’ve created intentionally or unintentionally, I’d love to hear what effect that has on your writing and if there’s any object or objects or books or plants or anything in your office or your writing space that inspires you and keeps you going. I would love to hear about that. Again, you can email me at hello at sarahwerner dot com, or you can feel free to use my contact form on my website.

And with that, this has been episode 14 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write every day. I am Sarah Werner, and I hope you have an amazing day.