Sep 4

Sep 4 That Ideal Writing Space – Ritual or Procrastination?

If I only had a place to write…

If you Google search for writing spaces, you’ll find advertisements for communal writing offices, blogs and articles where writers post pictures of their favorite places to write. If you peruse long enough, you’ll find glorious attic studios, garages turned into writing rooms where Ernest Hemingway would have happily gotten drunk with you.

I used to be that person: waiting for the perfect space to write. My ideal was a turret in an old Victorian where I could look out the window and daydream before I wrote. It would have a wrap around window seat and bookshelves any place there wasn’t a window.

I was 28 and living in a 600 square foot apartment with my boyfriend, another freelancer. And clearly, I was confused about my identity—was I a writer or a fairy tale damsel in distress?

I was indeed distressed. Without that place I had imagined in my head, I just couldn’t spend enough time to get into the rhythm of the writing. The self-doubt and other looming tasks lingered. I looked for studios. This was San Francisco—I couldn’t afford it. I tried draping a desk in my apartment with velvet and lighting sage before I wrote. [These were during my boho days.] I thought about turning a closet into a writing den—some famous author did that, I thought. But there was nowhere to put all the junk we kept in the closet.

Eventually, I began writing in Café Abir where I could watch people from my window seat. I wrote in my journal until I was bored by my navel gazing and then that magic moment happened: I wrote because I was too bored to do anything else.

Years later, I found I created first drafts best in bed. I bought myself a pillow desk! Most of my short fiction has been written half awake before my internal editor and demons were awake. As I became more confident, I found I could edit almost anywhere—even in my office at the law school.

Now, while I enjoy my home office filled with books and art, sometimes I prefer to recline on my couch. Sometimes I just chew gum until I my focus sharpens. The physical space is no longer precious—the ritual of becoming focused is what moves me.

“Don’t let the physical space be another reason you don’t write. Who needs that preciousness? After all, are you writing or decorating?”

some tips to help you create a ritual to help you write before you get that perfect space:

1. A photograph of someone who inspires you. By my desk I have postcards of artist Eva Hesse, playwright Lillian Hellman, and writers Patti Smith and Jane Austen. I haven’t framed them; I like to shuffle them like playing cards as I think.

2. A transition ritual. Unless you write first thing in the morning, chances are you will have to shut off the part of your brain that is replaying the day or running ahead to the next agenda item. Meditation—even five minutes is a good choice. But even as someone who aspires to mediate regularly, this sometimes puts me to sleep if my writing hours are in the evening. In Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, she urges artists to write three pages each morning—three pages longhand of anything that comes to mind. “The morning pages are the primary tool of creative recovery,” Cameron writes. All that negativity and worry that comes out on the page gets in the way of letting writing happen. I now use the “morning” pages as my transitional ritual into writing.

3. A token. When I took the LSAT, I wore my grandfather’s honor key from Fordham Law School—1924. He was an Italian immigrant –the son of a baker—who put himself through law school. Now, I keep a red jade circle nearby as I write—I was wearing it when I found out my play was being staged in New York.

4. Silence of the mind. This can mean music. This can mean white noise. This can mean headphones with nothing playing at all. But allow yourself the silence. Allow yourself the navel gazing and the doubt, and trust the process. Just sit there. Eventually you’ll get sick of yourself and write.