A Writer's Space Read online

  A WRITER’S SPACE

  Make Room to Dream, to Work, to Write

  ERIC MAISEL, PH.D.

  Copyright © 2008 by Eric Maisel, Ph.D.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any

  form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are

  made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

  Published by

  Adams Media, an F+W Publications Company

  57 Littlefield Street, Avon, MA 02322. U.S.A.

  www.adamsmedia.com

  ISBN-10: 1-59869-460-X

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59869-460-4

  eISBN: 978-1-44051-478-4

  Printed in the United States of America.

  J I H G F E D C B A

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  is available from the publisher.

  This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional advice. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.

  —From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations

  Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their product are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Adams Media was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters.

  Interior illustration by Grant Hanna.

  This book is available at quantity discounts for bulk purchases.

  For information, please call 1-800-289-0963.

  For Ann,

  Who for thirty years has provided the right space

  CONTENTS

  I. PHYSICAL SPACE

  1. Thinking about Your Writing Space

  2. Picking Your Space

  3. Protecting Your Space

  4. Honoring Your Space

  5. Adding Spaces

  6. And Why Even Get Out of Bed?

  II. HOME SPACE

  7. Like Taking Your Medicine

  8. The Space-Time Continuum

  9. At Home, Choosing

  10. Your Mind on Brownies

  III. MIND SPACE

  11. Your New Impeccability

  12. Self-Help for Neurons

  13. Pluto’s Not a Planet Anymore

  14. Creative Mindfulness

  IV. EMOTIONAL SPACE

  15. Emotional Intelligence for Writers

  16. The Weight of Individuality

  17. Quick Centering

  18. Upgrading Your Personality

  V. REFLECTIVE SPACE

  19. Mindful Self-Reflection

  20. Making Space for Seville

  21. Frank and Janet

  VI. IMAGINED SPACE

  22. Desiring Worlds into Existence

  23. Setting as Big Idea

  24. Sitting on Keats’s Bench

  25. The Richly Imagined Paragraph

  VII. PUBLIC SPACE

  26. Saying Something

  27. Standing Up

  28. On Not Being Quite So Nice

  29. Two Weeks in Italy

  VIII. EXISTENTIAL SPACE

  30. The Way of the Meaning-Maker

  31. Embracing Tremors

  32. Using Your Existential Intelligence

  IX. EPILOGUE: CREATIVE SPACE:

  A WRITING FABLE

  33. Phoebe Chooses

  34. Phoebe’s Novel Gets Under Way

  35. The Writer of Qualities

  36. Phoebe’s Novel Blooms in the Silence

  Other Works by the Author

  About the Author

  PART I

  Physical Space

  CHAPTER 1

  Thinking about Your Writing Space

  Other books for writers will tell you where to insert the commas and why your Parisian character shouldn’t wear a beret unless he’s Basque. I want to chat with you about some other things: how to get into the right “space” to write, how to orient and organize your neurons, how to sanctify and enliven your physical space, and how to create imagined spaces in which magic can happen.

  In the thirty-six chapters that compose this book I’ll use the metaphor of “space” to communicate how you can get a grip on your writing life and transform yourself from an occasional writer to a regular writer. My job, as I see it, is to cheerlead, to whip you into a frenzy, and once in a while to make you smile. Naturally, you will have to do the actual work.

  Let’s begin with your physical space, the place where you write. Should your desk face the door? Should it face the wall? What if your right shoulder faces the door and your desk is slightly to the north of the room’s only window? Should you keep books in your room or are they in league with the devil? Should your computer be stripped of its e-mail capabilities and of any software that can produce a game of solitaire? Should you wear pajamas or a business suit? Should you keep a second office in one of those urban writing centers (some with a two-year waiting list) where you go to really write? Should your walls be Navajo white, cream-colored, or Chinese red? Should your chair swivel? Should your head?

  Are these the right questions?

  Think of a hospital operating room. You wouldn’t want your surgeon distracted by the view, would you? If that operating room overlooked the ocean, you would hope that someone would have the good sense to pull the curtains, so as to prevent glare and a roving eye. Amy Tan, for instance, explained that she writes in a “very womblike place.” She has two offices, one in New York and one in San Francisco. The one in New York is a former closet with low ceilings and her office in San Francisco has a window she keeps covered with drapes to block out the view. “I cannot deal with distractions,” she confessed. “I had a beautiful office with views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay but my assistant, Ellen, has that office now.”

  Like a surgeon, your goal is to focus. You want to muster your resources and canalize your energy. As a general rule a large space dissipates energy, noise produces distraction, views rob the mind of neurons, toys cry out to be played with, and even a book near at hand is a reason to stop early. Of course you are permitted messes, piles of papers, shelves of books, iconic snow globes and photographs, and a view of the garden. However, your goal is to canalize your energy and have your brain connect to your fingers in such a seamless way that words appear on your computer screen by magic. For this to happen, your best bet is simplicity: a little quiet, a little organization, and a little reverence.

  Maybe church is a better analogy than an operating room.

  You will do better work with a quiet room, a closed door, a serene view or no view at all, a little organization (and all the mess you like), and that feeling in your heart that you are in the only church you need, the one where you pray poems and praise prose. What does a church need? Does it really need all that Gothic grandiosity or ornate rococo cake decoration? Or does it need just a bench, silence, and a little awe? That is all your writing space needs: a chair, a table, silence, and a little awe. Add anything else you like, if it serves you; but don’t forget this simple ideal.

  You also want the kind of organization that allows you to move as fluidly as you can from idea to idea, from chapter to chapter, from file to file, from story to story, from heartbeat to heartbeat. An extreme example of this organizational nicety was Isaac Asimov’s. He attributed the fact that he was able to write 500 books during his career to the way he set up his office—with tables all around the perimeter, each with several typewriters on it. Each typewrite
r stood ready for a different project and he would just “work my way around the room.” You need not go this far, but you do need to know where to reach when you are looking for Chapter 3 or those notes for that essay on Byzantium.

  Everything—the wallpaper, the cobwebs, the size of your font—is for the sake of your current project. You want to be reminded of and enveloped by that rich, new project, not by some past disaster (or success) or some future vibration. Alice Hoffman, for instance, paints her office a different color every time she starts a new book, one that resonates with the book’s themes, and sets out items that remind her of that book. You are a serially monogamous writer, in love with this precious new thing: let your space show it.

  That great Greenwich Village character Joe Gould, portrayed in a famous Alice Neel painting with three penises, wrote seven million words in his crazy career as an oral historian and street person. He accomplished this prodigious feat without ever having a home writing space or even a home. He wrote on park benches, under awnings during rainstorms, sitting on the curb, and, of course, in cafés, where sometimes he was hired by the café proprietor at the cost of a cup of coffee and a pastry to write and “look Bohemian.” Unfortunately, they were seven million words of psychotic ramblings. Might he have done better work with a quiet room of his own (and some mental health)? I think so.

  You want a quiet room (and some mental health). You may also write in airports, in Paris, on top of a mountain, at the laundry, and with Beethoven blaring. You will of course want to write whenever it strikes you to write, wherever you happen to be, and whether you have your best pen with you or only your purple lipstick. But let us agree on this basic proposition: chair, table, closed door, a computer or a pad, a little awe, a little love, maybe the shades drawn, and your brain humming. That is your physical space, and your church service.

  LESSON 1

  Moving words from your brain to the page is a prolonged act of thinking and feeling that requires that you inhabit a physical space. Any given physical space will do a better or poorer job of serving this process: how good a job does yours do?

  To Do

  1. Assess your current physical space. Is it quiet (or at a noise level that you like)? Is it secluded (or open in a way that you prefer)? Is it organized (or disorganized in an “organized” way)? Is it calming (or energizing in a way that suits you)? Is it the way you want it and need it to be?

  2. Describe your ideal writing space. What can you do to transform your current space so that it more resembles your ideal space?

  3. What is the biggest problem with your current space? Identify three possible solutions, decide which is the most feasible to implement, and make those changes.

  4. Is your space private? If it isn’t, can you make it more private or even completely private?

  CHAPTER 2

  Picking Your Space

  Often the places that are available to us do not suit us simply because we are not inclined to write. One client, an American poet living in Amsterdam with his Dutch wife and their two daughters, could not write in his perfectly fine study because the silence was just slightly off, his chair was slightly ill-fitting, his desk was slightly at the wrong height, and his door, as it didn’t lock, was often opened. The very threat of that door opening stopped him from writing. He knew that he was being “neurotic” about all this, but he nevertheless clung to his certainty that his space was just not conducive to writing. So he didn’t write.

  Of course his physical space wasn’t the issue—nor is physical space likely to be the issue with you. For example, a client of mine took one large step after another in order to position herself to write her book. She gave up her lucrative, sixty-hour-a-week day job. She convinced her husband that they should move to a rural area where the quiet would be conducive to thinking and writing. They moved to a rugged, beautiful area, purchased a house with stunning views, and reinvented themselves, he as a consultant, she as an online content writer for Web sites. They loved their new life, they loved the fact that deer visited and that storms whipped through the valley. But she didn’t begin her book.

  Every morning she came into her study, with its stupendous views through floor-to-ceiling windows, and felt a kind of paralysis. So as to be doing something, she’d check her e-mail, attend to business, and keep busy hour after hour until it was time to take a walk in nature or have lunch with her husband. The morning would pass this way, efficiently, productively, and sadly. The afternoon would prove even harder—more work accomplished, more sadness, more hours spent not writing her book.

  She could perfectly attribute her paralysis. Her parents had criticized her. She didn’t feel confident. She hadn’t written a book before. She wasn’t certain what the book was supposed to be about. She found her writing workmanlike but not sizzling. Her husband was a little needy and distracted her with his presence. She had to do her online writing to make money. Part of her found her book not important enough to write. Another part of her found her book not interesting enough to write. She got headaches easily. She’d never gotten her two short stories published, which was demoralizing. People loved her writing but their praise seemed unearned and so she dismissed it—even turned it into criticism. Her paralysis made perfect sense. She had the list to prove it.

  I learned all this and more in our first session. It came my turn to speak. I told her that I understood. I told her that she was making only one mistake. The mistake she was making was to think that she was writing a book. I told her that the word “book” had the iconic, mesmerizing power to snuff out the possibility of writing. She was inadvertently picturing her book among other books like War and Peace and Crime and Punishment, books that overwhelmed her and made her feel small and incapable. I told her that it was a big mistake to think that she was writing a book. In fact, what she was writing was a draft. The book would come later—perhaps much later—after countless pratfalls. She had no book to write, only a draft. Did she understand that effort and not excellence was the issue? She nodded telephonically.

  She agreed that she knew what she needed to do: the work. And indeed she tried. But the startling vista that confronted her in her study, a vista so large and engaging that even if you turned your back on it you felt its presence and its immensity, hurt rather than helped her. The floor-to-ceiling windows, devoid of covering, let in too much distraction. She tried moving her chair, moving her desk, averting her eyes, but nothing worked. Finally she decided to poke about the house and look for another workspace. She came upon a small, windowless room, not much larger than a walk-in closet, stepped inside it, and felt right silence descend instantly. This became her writing space, the place where she actually wrote. Finally she began her novel.

  Once you internally agree to get your work done you can write almost anywhere, but that doesn’t mean that you can vanish into your writing as easily in one environment as in another. In our first small house, I had a windowless basement study that was perfect for me. In our next house, a big suburban one, I had a score of objectively excellent writing spots and none of them felt congenial. In the upscale city apartment that followed that house, we had panoramic views that proved paralyzing. In our current small Edwardian flat, a room at either end suits me splendidly, the room at the eastern end bright in the morning, the room at the western end bright in the afternoon.

  Clearly these are subjective matters. In her excellent writers’ companion The Writer’s Mentor, Cathleen Rountree explained: “Poet and novelist Sherman Alexie, author of Indian Killer and Smoke Signals, does much of his writing at 3 A.M. at an International House of Pancakes. Eudora Welty said that she straight-pinned pieces of her stories together on the dining room table, as though she were pinning together parts of a dress.” Barbara Sjoholm explained in Incognito Street: “I knew, the first morning that I woke up in Hamar [in Norway], in my room in the big wooden house that looked just like something out of a Carl Larsson painting, that I was exactly in the right place. The walls were wainscoted with painte
d blue gray wood, the room had a single wooden bed and, most important, there was a pine table in front of the window, a table for writing.”

  Which spot in your house will be your primary writing space? Get up and start your investigations. Give every reasonable spot a try—and every unreasonable spot, too.

  LESSON 2

  Some writing spots are more congenial than other writing spots. Find your best spot; or create it, if it doesn’t exist, by pushing furniture around, by reclaiming the junk room, by doing whatever is necessary.

  To Do

  1. Be willing to write. No writing space will serve you if you aren’t.

  2. Go on a vision quest and locate the place in your home where you will write.

  3. Test out your writing space by writing in it.

  4. Keep writing there.

  CHAPTER 3

  Protecting Your Space

  Your husband comes home. You chat with him, have a drink together, have dinner. Then you go to your writing space, close the door, boot up your computer, empty your mind, and ready yourself to continue your novel.

  Right about the time the desktop icons appear on your computer screen, your husband storms into your study to complain about the auto insurance premiums. Don’t you agree that it’s time to switch to another company? Out of politeness, you listen to him vent about the price of insurance, the price of gas, and the price of his favorite cereal. You’ve heard this rant so often that you can repeat it word for word; you grit your teeth and wait for the rant to end.

  When he’s finally done, you turn to your computer screen and discover that you are entirely in the wrong frame of mind to write. You are angry with your husband, angry with yourself, frustrated about how long it’s taking you to write this novel, and suddenly exhausted. You turn off the computer and go to bed.