Does It Matter, Where We Write?
Posted by Andie Ryan Blog at 9/16/2010 5:45 PM 
Categories: Fiction Writing Junkies, Writing Life
Tags: writing environment writing place writing writing life
Categories: Fiction Writing Junkies, Writing Life
Tags: writing environment writing place writing writing life
I was holed up in an intermittently blizzard-bound, blacked out, freezing cold bed and breakfast on Martha's Vineyard with no cell phone or internet reception, wrapped in two blankets in front of a fire that was my only light, an unwanted sneeze-inducing cat curled up on my pillow. My car was frozen to the ground, the runway was unplowed, and if there was ever a time I wanted to light out, that was it. Yet in those two weeks, I produced about 200 manuscript pages.
I should have been able to write at least that much while staying away from home in comfortable weather with real light and no distractions other than a great dog who was content to lie at my feet while I worked. Zero pages.
Snow, lots of it, is the mother of my invention. Chalk up one for the blizzard.
How many times have we heard our writer friends say, "I can't write there..." ?
Writers use many tricks and habits to call forth the Muse. Bowls of apples in a drawer, stark rooms with a simple wooden desk and chair, a favorite armchair with a board across the lap, Credence playing in the background. Hemingway wrote on top of a refrigerator. Then there's your emotional connection to place, what the light and sound make you think of or feel.
Can you have such a connection to a place you've never been before? By all reason, I shouldn't have been able to scribble a word in that snowstorm for the worry and the just plain strangeness of the experience, not to mention the cold -- but the words flowed anyway. In a warm, quiet well-lit place with the best dog on earth, it was next to impossible.
Maybe the environment, whatever it is, is just the gateway. Maybe it simply prepares your mind, or eases it, like a batter's practice swing. Once you're really into the writing, little will distract you, and you may not even be fully aware of your surroundings. Do we derive some comfort at the careful placement of apples or tin soldiers or paperweights before the work forces us to leave them behind? Does the absence of what's familiar sometimes free us more than we realize?
Places matter and don't matter. When you're ready to write, ready to connect with your story, where you are is not so critical because that connection to your work -- physical or emotional -- is the "place" that matters most. An unfamiliar place brings a lack of usual distractions and excuses. Familiar places bring a sense of routine and order -- your table, your chair. Either, sometimes unexpectedly, can evoke a sense of possibility and allow you to see yourself becoming what you want to be. Perhaps it is this belief, or faith, that you must have as a writer, no matter what the geography -- the belief that the words will come.
When I was a kid, I imagined that a writer was always alone on a darkened landscape, in a house with one light burning, pen to paper. I never imagined furniture or garden trees, who the neighbors were, or even a particular type of pen. I never imagined that house being in any particular place. My "place" was a quiet solitude, somewhere I could focus my attention.
When I think of that brief stay in Martha's Vineyard, there was a house on a darkened landscape, a raging wind, a single window illuminated by firelight, and me at a small, wobbly wooden table, pen to paper.
A thunderstorm has just started here in the city. I love writing during a good storm, and always have. Like ocean waves, the sound of a storm silences everything else.
Pen to paper.
I should have been able to write at least that much while staying away from home in comfortable weather with real light and no distractions other than a great dog who was content to lie at my feet while I worked. Zero pages.
Snow, lots of it, is the mother of my invention. Chalk up one for the blizzard.
How many times have we heard our writer friends say, "I can't write there..." ?
Writers use many tricks and habits to call forth the Muse. Bowls of apples in a drawer, stark rooms with a simple wooden desk and chair, a favorite armchair with a board across the lap, Credence playing in the background. Hemingway wrote on top of a refrigerator. Then there's your emotional connection to place, what the light and sound make you think of or feel.
Can you have such a connection to a place you've never been before? By all reason, I shouldn't have been able to scribble a word in that snowstorm for the worry and the just plain strangeness of the experience, not to mention the cold -- but the words flowed anyway. In a warm, quiet well-lit place with the best dog on earth, it was next to impossible.
Maybe the environment, whatever it is, is just the gateway. Maybe it simply prepares your mind, or eases it, like a batter's practice swing. Once you're really into the writing, little will distract you, and you may not even be fully aware of your surroundings. Do we derive some comfort at the careful placement of apples or tin soldiers or paperweights before the work forces us to leave them behind? Does the absence of what's familiar sometimes free us more than we realize?
Places matter and don't matter. When you're ready to write, ready to connect with your story, where you are is not so critical because that connection to your work -- physical or emotional -- is the "place" that matters most. An unfamiliar place brings a lack of usual distractions and excuses. Familiar places bring a sense of routine and order -- your table, your chair. Either, sometimes unexpectedly, can evoke a sense of possibility and allow you to see yourself becoming what you want to be. Perhaps it is this belief, or faith, that you must have as a writer, no matter what the geography -- the belief that the words will come.
When I was a kid, I imagined that a writer was always alone on a darkened landscape, in a house with one light burning, pen to paper. I never imagined furniture or garden trees, who the neighbors were, or even a particular type of pen. I never imagined that house being in any particular place. My "place" was a quiet solitude, somewhere I could focus my attention.
When I think of that brief stay in Martha's Vineyard, there was a house on a darkened landscape, a raging wind, a single window illuminated by firelight, and me at a small, wobbly wooden table, pen to paper.
A thunderstorm has just started here in the city. I love writing during a good storm, and always have. Like ocean waves, the sound of a storm silences everything else.
Pen to paper.
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