The spot where typing happens
Does it matter?
Writers can give much thought to where and how and when they sit down to compose their thoughts. Maybe they prefer a home office setting — a place for notes, sketches, donut wrappers, the miscellany that hangs out on a writer’s desk. Maybe they prefer a coffeeshop, though I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone could concentrate with all that coffee, noisy fracas of drink orders, and the Muzac on the loudspeakers. Maybe they prefer cliches.
Maybe they prefer an old typewriter on a park bench. Maybe they can tote around an iPad and compose, as they say, “on-the-fly,” which means you can’t sit still for one moment. This seems a perfect match for poets and Tweeters, where brevity and the mundane combine. Maybe they prefer the click of an old typewriter, and we’ll never know that they are, in fact, writing. That is, unless they Instagram it.
My preference would be an office, detached from the home, where all those sketches, lists, books, and filing cabinets can live and breathe. Maybe they call this a study. But it has to be outside the home, a fair walk or a brisk bike ride away. It has to be far enough that I really have to motivate myself to go there and do my thing. It also must not have an Internet connection, that dreadful distraction, killer of good writing practice. I’ll know that if I can make it to the office, I can write, and therefore, I can call myself a writer. If I can’t make it, I won’t make it.
For now I sit at a card table in my bedroom, an iMac setup facing south so I can take in the view out my window. There are boats out there on the river I can see. Also I can keep tabs on the weather. It’s not the ideal spot, more a practical matter due to a crap economy and an allergy to joining the 9-to-5 hustle in the service industry. I fear that once I can afford the ideal office, I won’t be doing much personal writing at said office, the fate I (happily) lived through in my 20s. I have to earn that office, just like I have to earn good writing.
Maybe the most ideal place to type is anywhere you can.
