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Writing is a fairly boring art compared to something like sculpture or painting. Or maybe that’s just my perspective because writing is (mostly) what I do. I always assume that people aren’t really interested in pulling the curtains back on what the nuts and bolts of writing look like.
But there’s an article I’ve seen lately with pictures of the writing spaces of Booker Prize winners and my friend Randy suggested I should write a post about my own writing space, so here it is. All the glamour and glitz of where I write.
It is certainly fascinating to see the variety of places where people write. It’s clear that some people go with the barest, blandest space possible, sans windows or color or any possible distraction. You might call this the jail cell approach. Andre Dubus III built a sound-proof and windowless room in his basement to write in, so I guess you might also call it the dungeon model. Other people write at kitchen tables or back decks or graveyards.
For a long time, I didn’t have a dedicated writing space in our house. It’s not a very big house and the two bedrooms were occupied. We tried putting a desk in the very back room, a space I shared with my husband and his baseball cards (which is a whole other story), but that didn’t work. Then we put a desk in our bedroom and sometimes I did write there, though I was much more likely to sit in the IKEA chair that sat next to it.
In those early years, I was very much a nomadic writer. I wrote in our local coffee shop, especially at one of the spaces in the window looking out on Main Street. During the brief and euphoric period when my favorite restaurant—the 605 Grille—was open for breakfast, I would go sit at their bar and write, always with a cappuccino and the Greek yogurt with walnuts and honey. In fact, this very brief period when I was on my first sabbatical, writing my first novel, and spending mornings in the 605 Grille is amongst the very happiest times of my life.
At that point back in the 2010s, real estate in Madison was still jaw-droppingly cheap, especially by today’s standards. I spent a lot of time dreaming about buying a small house to use as my very own writing space. This sounds insane today, but the little house around the corner from us went on the market at one point for $60,000. This was not a fixer-upper, either, but a perfectly livable house.
In those days, I thought if I sold a book, I could use the advance to buy this cherished writing space. In Madison, everyone dreams in real estate. That did not happen. I never got an advance even approaching buy-a-house levels.
We briefly flirted with converting the sizable garage and potting shed at the back of our yard into a writing space. I imagined all glass walls, so I could look out on the garden. That, too, was out of our price range and, anyway, that space became the party pavilion during the pandemic and that probably saved our lives by allowing us to socialize outside.
When our daughter went away to college, we began a very slow and gradual process of making some writing space in her bedroom for me to use when she was in Bloomington. In fact, right before the pandemic hit, I’d bought a big drafting table and a nice chair to go with it. We set them both up in our daughter’s bedroom and within a few weeks, she was back home after her university shut down. I was back to writing in our bedroom.
It wasn’t until our daughter graduated from her master’s program and told us that she really wanted to live in DC that we full-scale converted her bedroom into my writing office or, as my husband calls it, my studiola. We got rid of her bed and got a futon instead. I painted the walls an off-white to maximize the light in a room that never gets direct sunlight. I made the space my own.
I love my office/studiola. It has multiple writing spaces. I do most of my writing still in that IKEA chair, usually with Kevin the cat either lying on my empty backpack or, in the winter, in her fuzzy cat bed. Then every now and then, I switch it up and sit at the drafting table. That’s also where I do most of my watercolor painting or sketching as well as all my course prep and grading.
Are any of these writing spaces ergonomic? I have no idea. I do try to get up and move around about every twenty minutes. The futon is obviously for when people come to visit—it folds down into a queen-sized bed. I thought I would maybe sit there and write some, but that has only happened once. My husband wanted a nice sitting space in the room so that he could, and I quote, “Come sit and watch me write.” Thankfully, he has never actually done this.
I mostly don’t shut the door to my room. I like being able to hear my husband humming and wandering around the house. I’m pretty good at tuning out noise. I spent a lot of time writing in the coffee shop, which is a fairly noisy place. Our house is a fairly noisy place, what with construction and motorcycles and altered mufflers and church bells. I think the more precious you are about your writing conditions, the less likely you are to actually write.
I wrote quite a lot of SEX OF THE MIDWEST in the party pavilion, outside, sitting on my lounge chair, which is probably one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. I wrote the stories out long-hand, in the favorite notebooks I discovered in Analog Coffee and Records and now buy online, which is one of my writing indulgences. Fairly expensive notebooks that come from Quebec, but they are, for me, the perfect notebook.
My other writing indulgence are espresso-flavored candles. I think our daughter gave me one of these for Christmas one year and now I’m addicted. They’re a bit expensive, but I do like to have a candle burning when I’m writing and these smell amazing. The candle is a bit of a ritual thing. I don’t light it if I’m doing course stuff or administrative crap. The candle is for writing and writing only. It’s a signal to myself that this is writing time. Maybe it’s also a bit witchy because writing, after all, is a kind of magic.
So that’s it, how the sausages are made so to speak. What else do you want to know, Randy, or anyone else? I’m always happy to answer questions. Comment or just reply directly to this email. I love hearing from people.
I’m also working toward doing a monthly Zoom conversation about whatever topic people want to talk about or a Q & A on a topic of your choosing. This will probably be for paid subscribers, so if you want in on that, upgrade now!
Boston or New England area subscribers, I have some events coming up in November in your neck of the woods.
I’ll be at Belmont Books in Belmont, MA, on November 18, 7:00-8:00. It’s free, but click here to register.
Then on November 20, I’ll be at Concord Center for the Visual Arts, along with my fellow Galiot author, , whose book, SWALLOWTAIL publishes Nov. 18. That’s from 7:30-8:30 and you know I’m totally going to check out Sleepy Hollow Cemetery while I’m there.
Love this, Robyn! Now I can picture you somewhere, working away on the next "Sex of the Midwest" or at least another great short story like "Hemmingway Goes on Book Tour." I did something similar a year or two ago and several regular readers said how much they enjoyed being able to put me in a specific place.