One of my pleasures in that strange time of Covid was the ‘At home’ series made by the Society of Authors. Viewers were taken into the writing room of a well-known author, who spoke about their writing processes in the setting they actually write in. Hearing about small rituals or foibles, and seeing their layout and tools, gave a sense of an intimate insight into the creation of their published works, which in turn added an extra layer of involvement on reading or re-reading their work.
In the spirit of sharing, I offer you a glimpse of my workspace. It’s sited in one corner of an all-purpose upstairs room, where I also put visitors, cello, and fitness equipment – plus of course bookshelves.
Sweeping from left to right, the floor lamp is used when it’s too late to read my notes, but I want to avoid the startlement of the overhead light. The ancient CD player gives me music while I write or exercise; I can’t cope with the distraction of words in English when I’m writing but a current favourite is Finnish Teija Niku’s dreamy Memento.
The first table holds my handwriting paraphernalia – a stack of draft paper, a pot of pens and pencils, and of course my Remarkable – a much prized writing tablet. I compose onto this then press the ‘convert to text’ button. It syncs with Remarkable’s app on my laptop from where I can copy & paste it to the relevant document. There is usually a book on writing lying around too; I tab useful sentences with small post-its, so I can go back to the relevant highlights without having to reread the whole volume.
On a card table, under the portrait of my aunt Eva as a baby, sits the second screen, my laptop and a keyboard. I can work on a document I’m editing, for example, on my laptop, while reading from the beta reader’s notes on the second screen. This two-screen setup is quite new, and I love it. It feels like a far more efficient way of working.
I sit on a wobble cushion placed on the kneeling chair, trying to maintain a healthy posture during my keyboard hours.
My mouse and mouse-mat live on my late mother’s sewing chest, along with coasters (my dirty British coasters) for my pint coffee mug and insulated coffee pot.
Behind the chair is one of the bookcases, with two reminders printed out and blutacked on to the end; the first contains instructions for how to format a word document with indented paragraphs, which I find inordinately difficult, and the second is Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘8 rules for writing’, which I found during some idle internet scrolling:
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things – reveal character or advance action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Perhaps I could throw away all the writing books.
This post also appears on my Substack page (Wordswim)
The 8 rules are excellent, and I will follow your lead: they will posted ny my desk, too.
The heads-up on the Society of Authors is appreciated, I shall join.
I couldn’t be without two screens, it does make work flow so much easier, and even so, is a poor relation to the spread of papers over a desk which used to be how to work. I’m interested in the Remarkable idea: I know that typing is more thoughtful and thought-provoking than simply speaking (as into a Dictaphone) but hand-writing is even more so, albeit harder to edit on the fly!
Thank-you for an inspiring post.
Lovely to have insight into your writing space, Miriam. The highlight, though, are Vonnegut’s rules. Must keep them!