Writing Spaces

A blog dedicated to writers and the spaces they inhabit. All posts are contributions by the writers themselves. The editor of this blog acts as curator only (unless otherwise noted).

[writingspaces-blog]

11. Icahn Saelao // mychestisempty

“You never stay in one place for too long, do you?”

I sat there and thought for a minute. It didn’t feel like a thousand years or an eternity, but a full minute; sixty seconds of pure thought.

“No, I don’t.”

She stared at my hands as they pathetically attempted to rub away the imaginary layer of crust that hides the molten red ink underneath. Where others may get that feeling of their heart breaking, I instead resist such an inward pain and I turn it outwards; instead, it is my hands that ache and break. My hands did so again, this time with a magmatic force that caused her ears to crack at the sound of the turmoil her question induced.

It occurred to me that I have never had much of a place to call my own, nor a space that I’m sure a lot of other people could conventionally call a “writing space.” I have moved more times than I would like to admit, and it has gotten to a point where I keep all of my belongings in boxes in anticipation for the next move. At the beginning of autumn, I counted my life in boxes. I never stay in any one space for too long.

I once spent a winter writing in a closet in a friend’s house because it smelled like wet trees after a night of fresh rain; strange how the first time I ever felt “at home” was in someone else’s residence. One day, however, the odor became so thick that it drenched anything that would step foot inside; so just like that, in less than a season, I put my life into a box and moved on. There was a Summer in the last spring, and I wrote on a hidden park bench with her at my side. For a season, I had this feeling that maybe this will last; but Summers always have a way of leaving on their own accord, don’t they? 

So what is my writing space? 

It isn’t the desk or coffee shop I furiously and frustratingly type at in an attempt to appear vain or profound. My writing space isn’t the room in my childhood home that was taken away from me on Thanksgiving of last year.

I realize I have learned a way to adapt to life and its ephemeral nature, and even though there is no literal space where I can sit, think, and write, I know my writing space will always be with me. I can proudly say that I take my writing space with me wherever I go, and it isn’t even the forty-three dollar pen I bought or any one of my three black spiral-bound notebooks; I do not carry nor sit in my writing space.

I wear it.

This is my writing space.

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10. Kelsey Ipsen // felimnn

When I first saw Writing Spaces I began wondering what my own space was. I didn't think I had one anymore. I used to have an old school desk, the wooden one where you can open the lid and store things inside. We had them at my country school when I was six, my friends and I used to catch those white cabbage moths between cupped hands and keep them inside. Every time we opened our desk lids, the flutter of wings. I remember, then, a teacher asking us to write down what we thought the Bermuda Triangle was, and I began writing an entire chapter book about a curious blue triangle that children would pick up and disappear into different worlds. I remember being upset because the rest of the class had written a sentence and the teacher had told everyone what the Bermuda Triangle really was and we all had to move on before I had even scribbled down two pages of my epic novel. I wanted to create my own worlds. I had read about so many in books I'd taken in piles underneath the flower bushes below my first bedroom window.

When I got my very own desk in my room I immediately began to gather trinkets, glass cases, old satin flower pictures in golden frames, animal masks, genie lamps, a typewriter. Inside the desk I kept my pages of writing folded up like butterfly wings. I rearranged my treasures all the time, trying to create even a part of my inside world that I could touch and see on the outside. I had stopped beginning my epic novels about Bermuda Triangles, dolphins and cakes, I had stopped scribbling my teenage poetry and fantasy stories and had begun writing secret prose about a boy across the ocean who I couldn't be with. I'd always been secretive about my writing, a world I felt I couldn't explain properly yet so I needed to keep it to myself and allow it to grow. When I got my Macbook,it was the perfect match; the hidden paper butterflies could always fly away but with my Macbook they were safe and shut in.

I started publishing things on my Tumblr page. I wanted to be braver. I wanted to be brave enough to share my own world and brave enough to be the girl I was when I wrote. I collected my words and treasures around me to remind myself. I wanted to be Matilda from The Ghost's Child and sail away across the oceans to find my bird. And I did, in a way. I began to feel suffocated by everything, like maybe I'd keep writing and piling up things until I'd never actually do. So I left all my treasures behind and the desk all empty of papery moths and moved to France. Now I'm with my bird and my books and I guess it's just these things, the bare yet favorite essentials, that have become my writing space. It's made me lighter, freer. I can feel it in how and why I write these days. With so much distance between myself and my former real world, I've been turning my old haunts into only words and finding ways to be my own world without the tricks and trinkets to surround it. Here I am now, and here I can finally be. 

[writingspaces-blog]

9. Isobel Frances May // shimmery

When I write, it’s normally dark. I’m talking about the sky rather than the subject matter, though you can perhaps feel the blackness of night in the words; see it amongst them the way you might see a red nose on somebody who’s just been crying. Day lights up reality and defeats fictions, but darkness gives thoughts mobility. I don’t have proper curtains in my bedroom; only lace ones. When I sit up in the early hours, ideas of the night become intrigued by this one electrically lit place. I leave my window open so they may come in. The darkness is an unknown between days. I write as I travel through it in same the way I write on trains. Between places, with no fixed destination, ideas are unrestrained and free. I’m lucky because I don’t get motion sickness.

I can’t have magazine subscriptions because I have no fixed address. The longest time I’ll stay in any place is, for the foreseeable future, ten months. I mustn’t give the wrong impression of myself as a well-travelled writer: I’m limited to two cities, 160 miles apart (though I recently spent a week by the sea). These photographs show my bedroom at my mother’s house. The walls are coloured blossom white, I painted them myself. When I move south in the autumn this room belongs to my sister, and she decorates it by sticking her certificates on the walls beside my favourite poems. It is a shared space; I write from in-betweens once more.

People tell me a lot to write what I know. There are certain things I have written that are not exactly about me, but which I feel define me. Those things are somewhat like theme tunes. If I close my eyes and say the first lines to myself, I am briefly aware of who I am. Last February I compiled these things into a series of letters to make a collection. I recently reread this and had a moment of crisis where I realised I could never write anything more that I knew. Those 1000 words said everything.

Now, I write about things that nobody knows, but I write about them with my reflection. Writing has always been a little egotistical, after all. I find if you write before a mirror and you’re lost for the next word, you can sometimes look up and see it in your face. In this way, you may write something you’ve never experienced whilst remaining true to yourself. I think it gives your writing a definite sense of identity; a disguise of certainty that makes the world you have dreamt up appear built on knowledge.

Sometimes, I write when darkness has just left, in the early morning when white light hangs in the lace of my curtain. At the best of times, ideas of the night are still present, quiet and sure of themselves. It is these ideas, unshy of the light, that I share. 

[writingspaces-blog]

8. Thea Tracanna // tat714

If I had to break down my favorite place, my writing space, into just one word, it would be a color: maroon. It's represented everywhere, from the big plush chairs, to the back wall, the counter tops, and even the felt covering all five pool tables. The basic essence of the Basement Brewhaus at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point: a dark purple-red that is visible no matter which direction a patron is sitting, lounging, or standing in line as they wait for their daily dose of caffeine (or three). Even the maroon shirts of the baristas, one of the most coveted work positions on campus, radiate a vibe of warmth and comfort. The bhaus, as it has been affectionately named by its regular crowd, rounds out its laid-back setting with mellow music flowing from Pandora 24/7 – unless one of the baristas is feeling late 90s pop or 80s classic rock. This change occurs most commonly on Thursday nights, when a decent percentage of campus's over-21 crowd descends to unwind and kick back dollar bottles of popular domestic beers.

“Illigitimis Non Carborundum” gleams down from the room's entrance way. This UWSP staple commands, “Don't let the bastards bring you down.” There are no public TVs or computers located in the space, and soliciting in verbal, pamphlet, or poster form is strictly forbidden. However, there are ample amounts of gossip, news, and nature magazines to read from, and taking a board game (guaranteed to be missing at least two pieces) off the shelf to play with friends goes unnoticed. But the second someone starts playing Youtube videos, Skyping, or even talking too loudly on their phone, dark looks and mutters of disapproval will likely be directed their way.

At any given time, there can be up to eight people fully stretched out sleeping, plus the ones simply reclined and dozing between reading assignments. The bhaus becomes a haven from the non-stop rush of college life, where a forty-minute lunch break between classes magically stretches into enough time for half a dozen activities, including the aforementioned nap.

I was not always an ordinary customer. For my final (and best) year of college, I was lucky enough to be one of thirteen baristas perfecting my milk-steaming abilities, rattling off beer specials, and knowing certain regulars' exact drink specifications without ever knowing their names. It has been over fourteen months since the end of my employment, and it took all that time for me to reconcile that I would never again be the only person there at 7am on a Saturday, the comforting motions of brewing coffee and turning on lamps waking me up to tend to the weekend's early birds. Much more often I was the weekday and night closer (I'm terrible in the morning, really) – instead of being the one starting fresh and new, I was the one shutting down and cleaning up messes. Stocking shelves, wiping down tables, and kicking people out, all the while singing along to Disney songs. Content with my basement fortress and making everything look pristine again.

So what does all of this have to do with writing? I have been graced with the gift of memory. I remember vividly what it feels like to be covered in coffee grounds and sticky beer, sometimes every day for a week. I remember the night there was a concert upstairs given by some blind rapper and Justin (my coworker) and I cleaned out the entire beer cooler, each making forty dollars in tips in less than three hours. I remember frustrated coworkers who left reprimanding notes everywhere, and every time we ran out of sweet chai during that never ending winter. The Brewhaus is more than my writing space; it is my writing inspiration. I go back there now, and everything hits me again. Some of it gets filtered through time, becoming more bittersweet or perfect in my head. Other memories stay just as sharp and clear as ever, bringing a sad smile to my lips as I lose myself for a second and let the moments wash over me. There is no place on earth like it, not for me. And I think what I've learned the most looking back over the past three years, but especially during that one year right in the middle – I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else.

[writingspaces-blog]

7. Melissa Dominic // darkmachines

I wish I could say I didn't concern myself with the place I create in, but, I'd be lying if I did. 

My bedroom is the space I write in and I've cultivated the entire area with the patience of a museum curator. It's daunting and I tell myself I don't have enough writing to show for all the work I actually get done, but, I've always been a person obsessed with setting and world building, so, it makes sense to me. I'm a creature of routine and over-organization and that shows as well (and is often coming unglued from the wall in the form of dry erase boards denting from the tiled floor). It's a bit cluttered, but I like it though. It's the tiny cottage of my life and the place I feel most comfortable. I think it's important.

My favourite place to write is my bed and maybe it is because the ideas float around better when I'm half asleep, mostly covered by bed sheets and I've lost my glasses under the pillows around me. But my most productive writing comes from the craft table I've set up as a secondary desk because the original desk across the room doesn't have enough room with the large speakers and candles and lamps and pump bottles of hand lotion taking up all the space. I have an obsession with keeping the things I love close at hand: a photograph of me and my girlfriend, the scarf from my first soccer game, all three hundred plus of my books, my Iron Man headphones, neon sneakers and the Napoli soccer jersey I keep artfully hanging off the closet door to remind me of what I am trying to do (and what I am trying to do involves writing a story about soccer and music and cities that can't die, not just yet). There are tiny things everywhere, taking up every free inch. But nothing about it feels cluttered to me.

I don't pretend that I need all this stuff to get anything done though. I know better than that. Really, to write, all I need is either my netbook or my notebook and maybe something playing low in the background. I could be anywhere, outdoors or inside, in transit or killing time while waiting around. Stories come from thoughts and effort, not positions in the world or items around you...

But, I'd really prefer it if I could bring everything else along with me too. You know. Just for good luck. Or good measure. 

Something like that.

[writingspaces-blog]

6. Joseph Dante // lettersforburning

I’ve had three rooms of my own. I don’t remember the first, because I was so young, and the second I remember mostly from when I was a teenager. That was when I had gel in my hair and had a special preference for silence over music. At that age, I wasn’t sheltered or fluent in a dead language, but I may as well have been both. Friends of friends would meet me and ask: what music do you listen to? It was inevitable, the quick sizing up and labeling process of youth. Nothing, I would say. I just like it quiet. I like to read books. If these friends of friends existed outside of my advanced placement English class, it would usually end the conversation. But I liked to believe that listening to the words in your head was like involving yourself with music. It was just hard to convince other people about this, other spiky-haired people who had their walls plastered with bands you’d never heard of.

My walls never had bands plastered on them, and they don’t now, here in the third room. They’re rather plain. The walls are still white as ever (save for the one by the window, which is blue). Instead of my honor roll certificates and academic achievement plaques, I have pictures. I have pictures from the internet, a scene from New York, and art by a friend of mine who wanted to do a visual interpretation of my teenage poetry. I’ve moved on to writing fiction since then, which was probably for the best. But it still has to be quiet. I’ve always thought of it as meditative and careful, and I can’t have people watching me. Sometimes, I shut my door and lock it. My sister is a teenager now and she can listen to music while she does her homework. She’s street smart; she grew up speaking the language. She’s afraid of silence. We somehow share half of our genes.

The first ideas usually come when I’m elsewhere though: when I’m taking a walk with my mom, when I’m in the shower, when I’m going to sleep or about to wake up. I have to run to my laptop or rip a piece of paper off to get it all down before it vanishes completely. When it’s set down, it becomes like a program I have to develop or untangle. I always imagine it as more mechanical and electrically-powered than anything romantic or sepia-toned. It has to all fit properly together, the teeth have to turn like a machine. I think I’m often mistaken as a paper person, but I only use notebooks and cheap erasable pens for making lists (a habit I developed in college because of my need for organization) and writing letters. Not many people think of it as a rhythm, but if you keep on yourself about how you need to get your stories done, just like work, more will come to rattle you awake like an alarm clock. Just on time, just like a Christmas ghost. Every time, watching them watching you.

I stay inside a lot, and there are usually books lying about. I have bookshelves here, as well as more bookshelves outside my room. I’ve actually gotten to the point where I’ve read most of the books I’ve bought, and I should probably get rid of some soon. I’ve not always had bookshelves, but I’ve always had two television sets: one for video games, another for sleeping (none for watching, except movies sometimes). While I still prefer the quiet, every night, I need the buzzing of boring dialogue from a boring sitcom. It’s the right noise to turn myself off.

I’ve only started bringing myself to music. During the day, Fiona Apple is on repeat. My adolescence is catching up with me. I feel like I haven’t grown that much. I’m still small and soft-spoken. I don’t feel the need to raise the volume if I have the right words. It’s colder and quieter here than the other rooms that try to introduce other temperatures and noises. My writing is all of this.

[writingspaces-blog]

5. A.E. Montana // tree-rings

I think it's very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person. - Olivia Wilde

I have always been drawn to the serenity of the woods. I can remember even as a young kid wishing I was allowed to wander further into the forest behind our backyard, because there is something ethereal about the hidden vibrating life resting between the trees. There is such a sanctuary in nature, if you can manage to tune out every other thing that is constantly demanding your attention. This is where I escape to reunite with my words.

Life has a way of skillfully distracting you with shallow pursuits when you are always in the company of others. As much as I've grown to understand that spending time out in the world with people you love is important because you are gathering experience from which to write, being left alone to do the actual writing has always been a requirement because it allows me to delve into that deeper place in my heart where true expression is possible. My family and close friends learned early on that the announcement, "I'm writing," means that I will probably disappear from the world for at least a couple hours. Sometimes more!

Among others, my most commonly visited natural space is a quick walk from work, so I often stop by after a long, frustrating day when I've tired of the world in general. It's not too far off from the main walkway by the river but always seems to be unoccupied when I need it most. Underneath a giant (now) unused powerline structure, there's a wooden deck that juts out over a small series of waterfalls and is a perfect place to close my eyes and let the water scrub my mind of all the things distracting me on the surface. 

You do not often discover the value of a writing space until you've had some profound experience that sears its significance in your memory forever. I've had more than a few in this particular spot, one of the more recent ones a few weeks ago when I found out my best friend's dad has maybe a month to live. The news wasn't as much of a surprise as it was a blow to my heart. It's never a gentle path when you know you can't do anything to take pain away from someone you love so deeply. Overwhelmed by this huge feeling of helplessness and grief, I stumbled down to this place and spent a few solid hours crying, pouring my heart out to God, and finally, after I emptied myself of everything, found some words to preserve in my journal.

Somehow, you can be more honest with yourself when the woods is sheltering you from the rest of the world, and the sounds of the river rushing by you are covering up your frustrated mutterings as you try to figure yourself out. Writing has always been a powerful tool of communication for me, but never more potent and effective than when I began using it to discover who I am and how I process life. The spaces I've claimed are a reflection of the life I lead and the peace I crave to find perspective on my existence and my purpose in the world.

[writingspaces-blog]

4. John Marotta, Jr. // asavinggrace

"People have died in much less poetic ways," said my best friend Brian as he stared at me astounded and mildly impressed. I was perched atop a concrete ledge with my left leg limply hanging off the edge, and my right foot planted flatly so that I could rest my navy blue Moleskine notebook on my thigh and sketch some thoughts. I couldn’t help it. The scenery was too inspiring not to try to capture it in some tiny way before it completely disappeared from the loose-gripped trappings of my mind. Also, we were in the south of France. In Montpellier, to be precise. The next day proved to be an interesting one: there was a dramatic drunken argument between two of my closest friends; a seemingly timeless midnight soiree involving fireballs, accordions, and waltzing; and it ended with the lights going out (along with my pulse) in a narrow stairwell just as we entered a strange, but polite, Frenchman’s apartment. The following morning, after obtaining a café au lait, we settled into a charming park to have our breakfast and stretch our legs. In an effort to put down the experiences of the prior day I stood at a podium-like structure with my pen and aforementioned notebook. Ninety minutes. That’s how long I stood there writing, stopping only to turn the tiny pages. With the sun beating down upon me, and sweat dripping from my forehead, I couldn’t stop until it was all written, all excised from my mind.

It was a year and a half prior to that trip, while studying abroad in Greece, that I began the habit of taking this sidekick notebook with me anytime I went anywhere. I’ll never forget the seven hour boat ride from Athens to Santorini. The boat departed the port of Piraeus around 3:30 am, and I was the only person in tow awake during the magnificent sunrise. I sat on the deck alone, with mist kissing my face, and notebook resting in my lap, filling the pages with impressions of the indescribable beauty that lay before me. Out there on the Aegean I began my own odyssey, embarking upon a creative journey in which I’m still partaking.

“You look pensive, like you’re writing poetry or something,” said my buddy Jake in jest as he goofily approached me. “Actually," I replied, “That’s exactly what I’m doing.” He laughed heartily in disbelief. I can’t blame him—what kind of grad student studying public policy pens poetry in between running regressions and writing policy briefs? So goes my dual existence. Policy analyst by day, wrestling with tragically flawed data. Scribe by night, being pinned to the wall with words that are never quite poignant or insightful enough. Despite my romantic stories of death-defying scribbling and self-revelatory moments out on the sea, most of my writing occurs in my bedroom during the infinite time between dusk and dawn. When I can’t sleep. When the only way to get the words out of my head is to place them gently upon the page. What has remained constant during my personal writing journey is the undeniable impact of place: every sentence that I write is the product of the physical environment that surrounds me, from the mundane to the remarkable.

[writingspaces-blog]

3. James Drew

I wrote the first two drafts of a TV pilot from a standing workstation. Actually, it was more like the only open spot in a crowded bedroom; there was a shelf at about chest-height. I worked on that. I got the drafts done, but I learned there's a special place in hell for people who advocate these things. If someone tries to tell you that working from a standing position is "better" for you, and for some reason they can't quite back up with science, you can punch them square in the throat. So I sat back down at my desk. And the couch. And from the park, when the sun went behind a cloud and I could see my laptop.

I change my working environment often and regularly because once every few weeks I'll read something about a famous writer and their routines. They'll have their spaces and little rituals and me, being a tiny freelancing guppy frantically splashing around in their pool, I'll emulate them so I can feel like a "proper" writer. It's stupid, and I know it's stupid, but I think I have a defective gene because I keep doing it.

I woke up at four-thirty in the morning for about a month so I could sit down at my typewriter for an hour before I headed out to work at six because some guy on a podcast said that's what he did. For a while, I carried around a pencil rather than a pen, so I could erase my stupider notes, like that one lady in the New Yorker. I moved my desk to face North like Charles Dickens did, and that worked for me until I found out what Shirley Jackson used to do. I have done the ritualistic back exercises and the pomodoros and once, briefly, for a whole afternoon, I disconnected from the entire internet.

(Twitter doesn't count.)

I am a cognitive dumping ground for sketchy writing advice. My name is James and I can quit any time I like.

I'm working out my rhythms. I carry around a notebook and a pen, which is where all the hard work gets done. The ideas and the sketching and the outlining, you know. The urge to Get Things Done strikes at inconvenient times, like when I'm in the shower or on the tube or just when I've had too much to drink to remember the password for my laptop. This is how I find things like "food wizard" scribbled in there.

The problem: I can't read my own handwriting in the pen-and-paper 'analogue' notebook. It's entirely possible I wasn't even talking about a food wizard.

So, invariably, I use Evernote for text and audio notes, which then get transferred to a robust word processor on my laptop. The only piece of sketchy writing advice I can offer is this: it doesn't matter where the work gets done as long as it gets done.

It's working out for me so far, but ask me again next week.

[writingspaces-blog]

2. Frankie Drew // hurryuppleaseitstime

In my experience two things will tell you everything you need to know about a person; their room and their hair - I’ve always had the latter in abundance but the former gets away from me. My hair is fresh dyed red today, I’ve been thumping about the house in a dressing gown that belonged to my grandpa, smells of attics, is indecently flimsy. I’ve gained so much weight recently and it isn’t fitted, or flattering; I’m all rolls of flesh and hips and breasts and the hair; bright red, unwashed hair still curled from the night before, still reeking of fags and whatever it was I drank so much of - I feel like a filthy Botticelli. A good room or good hair can do that for you; turn a fat, stinking, grub girl who hasn’t dressed all day into a work of art for an afternoon. It’s about setting, it’s about decoration.

I’ve lived in the same house my whole life and we’ve always suffered from lack of rooms and room. Hide and seek was pitiful, sleepovers a nightmare, it’s only gotten worse over the years as my Mum collected other people’s children while I collected pets and siblings. My Dad is a problem solver, he built our house bigger, he made two new rooms and a garage, which became a bedroom, which became a bedroom and a half. These days I sleep in the half, which is fair. I left, after all, for university, for rooms that weren’t mine no matter how much money I shelled out and came back three years later with my tail between my legs and a car full of stolen kitchen utensils. A sister stole the perfect bedroom and writing sanctuary I’d carved out of concrete since I was twelve. You snooze you lose.

I might not have a place to write but I have a time, I have four thirty in the morning and at four thirty in the morning I have everything; or at least a house, and a whole one. I don’t settle straight away, like a dog turning in circles before it sits I scour the terrain, I write what I can where I can, on sofas and beds, on kitchen floors and dining room tables. I collect posters and bookends and candles and I imagine the room I’d make for myself, if I could. I’d fill it with books.

A room without books is a body without a soul, I’ve been told, but that seems so melodramatic and I do enjoy a good bathroom. I can’t sleep in a room without reading material but I like to think it’s for more pragmatic reasons, that I’m no romantic, that I don’t graciously bestow an unmerited mystique upon those bound up bits of paper I’ve collected over the years. I need to know, Sarah, Thomas, Virginia, that you’ll be there in the morning, in the middle of the night if I need you, to read you. I need to know, I need a promise, not a half hearted plan: “Perhaps I’ll get up in time to go to the library, perhaps they’ll have it” because they won’t, they never do and it’s bullshit - I want to remember Prufrock now. I want to learn it, I want to learn every book I own off by heart. If I can’t have a room I want to be a room, full of important things and beautifully decorated, an interior designer’s wet dream with really great hair.

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1. Angela Marie // amariefox // sorrowandlust

Oh, it’s just a plain room for a rather plain woman. A good friend of mine recently gave me a collection of three Moleskin notebooks with a note attached that read: ‘For the room of one’s (your) own, however it must look.’ Of course, I did not say what I was thinking aloud; as to not sound ungrateful, but the thought crept back to me, in its shameless cowering state. For the other side – perhaps the vain or material side – wanted a room with a view. A room with proper lighting and comfort. One with all sorts of feminine objects and trinkets, like little porcelain deer, antique jewelry boxes, mason jars full of daffodils, or vintage photographs of women in swimming caps pinned to the wall. All the beautiful girls keep such things about their bedrooms, or I imagine they must have, and I cannot say that I do not envy them because I do.

The room that is my own is just a quiet bedroom, the same one I have lived in my entire life. It is where I carved my first love poems in the back of my closet, where I handwrote my first novel about a girl who kept turning blue because she was so sad. My whole twenty-three years I have, for some reason or another, retreated to this single space where I ceased to be myself, but another entity altogether, existing separately from the rest of the world. Seven months ago, I sat down with intention to begin my novel, the thing I would later labor over, obsessively and anxiously. No, I didn't wake up every morning and open the window to let the sunshine in, I continue to write in the night, as I always have. In fact, the only real change I made was to prop a painting of blind Milton and his three daughters up next to my computer. There he sat, keeping me company, the man I loved, admired, revered. I required his presence, in whatever small way, to remind me that every night he would stay up, as well. In those lonely hours before dawn, he'd memorize line after line before his daughters awoke in the morning to document them. His whole life he waited to compose Paradise Lost; could you imagine waiting your whole life to do something, biding your time as a civil servant, only to be dealt a debilitating handicap such as blindness? What a cruel joke, what a sad fate. Still, though, he never faltered, as I am sure many others would have in his place. 'No excuses,' I recite to myself, at three in the morning when it is especially difficult to write a scene and when I want to delete everything and quit. I close my eyes and burrow into my head. 

So then, a desk with a nice view is nothing when the view is often just inside of your mind. I never needed beautiful things, because all of the things I ever needed existed within me, invisible and hidden. All of my art, in its various forms, whether visual or otherwise, was just an attempt to bring my visions to the outside. One must begin with a rather plain room, I suppose, if they mean to color the void of it. When I open my eyes, I see what little I have accomplished. The walls and floors wait open armed for all of the possible fetus' of ideas that have not yet been pushed out yet. 

Virginia Woolf’s ghost surely must haunt a lot of rooms, the rooms of young writers slouching over their notebooks or keyboards or typewriters, and she must smile at their concentration. After all, the point she was making was not that one must have a necessarily visually appealing room, but that one just simply have a room to begin with.

Plain rooms for plain people, I have learned, are suitable as long as those people can write something that bursts out of the room and transcends it, hovers overhead like a prayer from the lips of the old blind Milton to his single dove, the Muse.

[writingspaces-blog]

Welcome!

My name is Joseph, and some of you may already know me from other places. I'm a writer who decided to start this blog in order to create some kind of new community surrounding an activity that is often thought of as very lonely (and often is). I want to bring together a collection of writers from across the internet, highlighting where they work and why they do it.

But I need your help. This blog is brand new and I'd appreciate it if you'd spread the word as far and wide as possible. If you think you know some writers who would be interested, encourage them to submit. Once I get enough submissions and see there's enough interest in the project, I'll start to publish them on some kind of regular basis. Really, in the end, it's up to all of you to see how far this will go. Ideally, I'd like to get as many writers as I can (both published and not) to share a story about their space. I'd like it to turn into a cozy hub for finding and connecting with others with similar interests. People often lament how lonely writing is and how insular places like Tumblr can be - well, here's our chance to fix both of these problems.

Let's do this.