I'm always curious about the habits and habitats of writers--i.e. how and where we write. Every so often a writing pub will feature a story on writing spaces, and I find them fascinating. I just went back and dug out an old Writer's Digest to reread their piece on "The Write Space" to get some ideas for this post.It's a goal of mine to one day have a proper writing space--as in, just the right desk, bookshelves that aren't bursting at the seams, and some sort of order to the stacks and stacks of piles in the room. I'm far from that! I do 85% of my writing in a room full of semi-controlled chaos--on a (cluttered) computer desk in my (cluttered) spare bedroom, where my bookshelf is, in fact, bursting at the seams (which means that's also cluttered). Most of my active writing projects are contained to a plastic file box and a stack of "working" file folders on the little catch-all nightstand/bureau right next to the computer desk. A creative mishmash? You'd better believe it!
But somehow, it works for me. I guess our creative spaces have to serve our purpose, or else we wouldn't get a whole lot of work done. If it's not going well, we just make the small adjustments needed in order to get the work flowing again. Someday, though, I aspire to a room full of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and possibly a worktable (OK, a desk) that all but takes up one wall. Something like, well, the space in the picture I used with this post. That looks just about perfect to me!
What about you? Describe your writing space. What, if any, changes would you make to it? If you don't have your perfect writing space, what would that look like?
Flickr photo by nbklx17 (Sandy)
