Sunday, July 12, 2009

The Author in Her Habitat

I did everything but write in that room ... I paid bills. I printed things out. I sent faxes. I was connected to the Internet. ... The assumption is that writers can write wherever they can sit down ... But the main thing you need as a writer is a sense of certainty that you won’t be interrupted.
Novelist Roxana Robinson, talks about her personal writing space in The New York Times, and explains why she abandoned her book-lined study for a more austere working environment.

And she isn't alone, she says, in seeking a space away from distractions. As she points out :
Raymond Carver ... claimed that he wrote his short stories in the front seat of his car. Ernest Hemingway holed up above a sawmill in Paris. When the essayist Annie Dillard wrote in a college library, she found the comings and goings in the parking lot outside her window so distracting that she drew a sketch of it, closed the Venetian blinds, and taped the sketch onto the blinds.
Many more writers' room at The Guardian.

2 comments:

Eggy said...

yeah complete isolation.

but who's going to feed us?

Elizabeth said...

I love reading about writing spaces.

I used to write in my library - I have this antique looking table, and to see it surrounded by rows of books ... ahh ... indeed, it was the "perfect" writer's room ... until I started sneezing because of the dust in it. Ah, allergies.

Now I write in my more spartan study - sans books.