Location, Location, Location
I write best in a space with no books. I've never understood why, but it's true. In the last few years, most of my writing--except this blog--is written on my laptop while sitting in my car or in the dining room where we never eat and have historically used for projects like my daughter's 4th grade California mission project. Occasionally, I'll write from the office of my private investigation business in Ventura, but I find I'm distracted by the spirits of theater and investigation that haunt this space, so I avoid doing anything creative there. It's a good place to edit or make minor re-writes, but for getting the juices to flow, it's one big damn dam.
As a twenty-something writer, in the 1970s, I spent an enormous amount of time sitting at the counter of a coffee shop writing on napkins or candy wrappers, because I wasn't one to schedule my writing but walked my world patiently waiting for the horn of creativity to blow. And it blew in strange places and times. I once wrote an entire short story on the backs of an entire deck of business cards belonging to a doctor who made me wait too long in his waiting room.
In 1972, I wrote the lyrics of a musical play while sitting on three occasions in the Queen Mary--not the ship--but a loud, nearly dark Studio City transvestite performance club in Los Angeles, where gay men performed as famous starlets and singers. I don't remember how I got there, but I wasn't alone. Uh, I don't want to remember with whom. I don't remember if it was transgenderness that inspired me to write. And, uh, I don't want to remember. The play was about the dire consequences of being an adolescent committed to a special "behavior modification" ward in a mental hospital. Strange idea for a musical, but I managed to write most of the lyrics and book. But I never finished it. I probably could blame the location where the play consummated its beginnings. But I won't.
In 2002, I wrote the entire screenplay for Open Spaces, a feature film I directed, over an 8-day surveillance in Santa Barbara, sitting on a frontage road running beside and separated by a chainlink fence from busy Highway 101. My subject was a boring, albeit, suspected cheater. She never went anywhere, so if she was cheating, the men were slipping in through the back door. I sat for 50 hours (billing $75 an hour) in my car smelling exhaust and tire rubber, screwing my neck up by looking up and down, up and down, up and down between laptop and my subject's front door, writing a movie about three characters suffering from agoraphobia. Writing in a space the size of an airline seat could turn a writer into an agoraphobic.
I wrote the play, American Right, sitting in near total darkness in my car on the 357-acre campus of Besant Hill School of Happy Valley, a boarding school founded by the writer Aldous Huxley, in Upper Ojai, amidst roaming packs of coyotes, hooting owls, curious frogs and families of deer, where I work three nights a week as the head of their campus watch security team. Liberals are probably snickering: "Of course he has to be in total darkness to write something about the American Right."
This blog is generally written in a sitting room in the master bedroom that we transformed into a home office. I sit and write with virtually nothing of my own around me, except the cup of coffee I've brought from the kitchen, and dozens of framed posters of the plays I've directed on the walls. Everything else belongs to my wife, who uses the office to manage the household finances. It's not my space. But I can't write my blog at my own office (distraction factor) or in my car (techno factor).
So. Location, location, location. I wondered where other writers wrote--particularly well-known writers. I sought out their writing rooms and was surprised by what I found.
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe Seamus Heaney's Writing Room
Generally known as an Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, has also written prose and plays. This famous, Irish writer actually writes in the corner of his Dublin home attic. A slab of board on two filing cabinets make his desk. Only a financially successful poet would disregard the context of money making it possible to work on a real desk. He says he has a view of Howth Head and Dublin Port.
Howth Head Dublin Port
I'm guessing at what Seamus really sees out his attic window, but Howth Head and Dublin Port offer a view with quite the poetic contrast.
Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer, author of the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, one of the first American writers to integrate the 9/11 attack as a pivotal theme to a plot, uses visual writing. A product of the information age, his books have a multimedia element, whereby he uses typesettings, spaces and blank pages as a visual progression to the story. The last 15 pages of this novel is a flipbook of a man falling up to the top of the World Trade Center.
So it wasn't a big surprise when I discovered that Foer writes from the Grand Army Plaza Branch of the New York Public Library in Brooklyn. Before moving to Brooklyn, he lived in Queens and wrote from the grand Rose Reading Room of the 42nd Street Branch.
Rose Reading Room Jonathan Safran Foer's Writing Room
In 2007, Jonathan wrote: "The [42nd Street Branch] library was a straight and convenient shot along the 7 train from my apartment in Queens. When I switched boroughs to Brooklyn, I also switched libraries. I now do my writing - I am writing these words - at the Grand Army Plaza Branch, just 10 blocks from my home."
His brother Joshua works while sitting across from him. "In Brooklyn," Jonathan wrote, "people regularly carry on cellphone conversations at their desks, regularly sing along to the music they are listening to through their earphones (why wear earphones at all?), regularly have conversations (which are regularly about illicit things), regularly fall asleep...regularly prepare and eat meals, stare, hum, hoot, and get in scarily heated arguments with the roaming policemen about what's acceptable behavior. It's my best argument for why Brooklyn is the superior borough: it's real."
So was 9/11.
Christopher Hampton is a British novelist, screenwriter and translator. He wrote the 1988 screenplay adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons and the more recent screenplay adaptation for Ian McEwan's Atonement, both bringing him Academy Award nominations. He has also translated from French Yazmina Reza's plays, 'Art', which I had the pleasure of directing several years ago, Conversations After a Burial, and God of Carnage.
Hampton works from a beautiful London flat. He wrote: "We moved into the flat in 1971, so I've probably spent more of my life in this room than any other. I've had all kinds of arrangements, different tables, small reproduction desks in the window, but finally I commandeered, purely on account of its surface area, this very plain Habitat dining table and set my chair looking into the room so I wouldn't be distracted by what might be going on in the street." Whack! I shoulda had a V-8!
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe Jane Austen's Writing "Room"
Jane Austen described her writing as being done with a fine brush on a "little bit (not two inches wide) of ivory." She wrote on a surface not much larger than that. This delicate dozen-sided piece of walnut on a single tripod is likely the smallest table ever used by a writer. But not much bigger than the present-day laptop used by the literati in Starbucks.
As a twenty-something writer, in the 1970s, I spent an enormous amount of time sitting at the counter of a coffee shop writing on napkins or candy wrappers, because I wasn't one to schedule my writing but walked my world patiently waiting for the horn of creativity to blow. And it blew in strange places and times. I once wrote an entire short story on the backs of an entire deck of business cards belonging to a doctor who made me wait too long in his waiting room.
In 1972, I wrote the lyrics of a musical play while sitting on three occasions in the Queen Mary--not the ship--but a loud, nearly dark Studio City transvestite performance club in Los Angeles, where gay men performed as famous starlets and singers. I don't remember how I got there, but I wasn't alone. Uh, I don't want to remember with whom. I don't remember if it was transgenderness that inspired me to write. And, uh, I don't want to remember. The play was about the dire consequences of being an adolescent committed to a special "behavior modification" ward in a mental hospital. Strange idea for a musical, but I managed to write most of the lyrics and book. But I never finished it. I probably could blame the location where the play consummated its beginnings. But I won't.
In 2002, I wrote the entire screenplay for Open Spaces, a feature film I directed, over an 8-day surveillance in Santa Barbara, sitting on a frontage road running beside and separated by a chainlink fence from busy Highway 101. My subject was a boring, albeit, suspected cheater. She never went anywhere, so if she was cheating, the men were slipping in through the back door. I sat for 50 hours (billing $75 an hour) in my car smelling exhaust and tire rubber, screwing my neck up by looking up and down, up and down, up and down between laptop and my subject's front door, writing a movie about three characters suffering from agoraphobia. Writing in a space the size of an airline seat could turn a writer into an agoraphobic.
I wrote the play, American Right, sitting in near total darkness in my car on the 357-acre campus of Besant Hill School of Happy Valley, a boarding school founded by the writer Aldous Huxley, in Upper Ojai, amidst roaming packs of coyotes, hooting owls, curious frogs and families of deer, where I work three nights a week as the head of their campus watch security team. Liberals are probably snickering: "Of course he has to be in total darkness to write something about the American Right."
This blog is generally written in a sitting room in the master bedroom that we transformed into a home office. I sit and write with virtually nothing of my own around me, except the cup of coffee I've brought from the kitchen, and dozens of framed posters of the plays I've directed on the walls. Everything else belongs to my wife, who uses the office to manage the household finances. It's not my space. But I can't write my blog at my own office (distraction factor) or in my car (techno factor).
So. Location, location, location. I wondered where other writers wrote--particularly well-known writers. I sought out their writing rooms and was surprised by what I found.
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe Seamus Heaney's Writing Room
Generally known as an Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, has also written prose and plays. This famous, Irish writer actually writes in the corner of his Dublin home attic. A slab of board on two filing cabinets make his desk. Only a financially successful poet would disregard the context of money making it possible to work on a real desk. He says he has a view of Howth Head and Dublin Port.
Howth Head Dublin Port
I'm guessing at what Seamus really sees out his attic window, but Howth Head and Dublin Port offer a view with quite the poetic contrast.
Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer, author of the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, one of the first American writers to integrate the 9/11 attack as a pivotal theme to a plot, uses visual writing. A product of the information age, his books have a multimedia element, whereby he uses typesettings, spaces and blank pages as a visual progression to the story. The last 15 pages of this novel is a flipbook of a man falling up to the top of the World Trade Center.
So it wasn't a big surprise when I discovered that Foer writes from the Grand Army Plaza Branch of the New York Public Library in Brooklyn. Before moving to Brooklyn, he lived in Queens and wrote from the grand Rose Reading Room of the 42nd Street Branch.
Rose Reading Room Jonathan Safran Foer's Writing Room
In 2007, Jonathan wrote: "The [42nd Street Branch] library was a straight and convenient shot along the 7 train from my apartment in Queens. When I switched boroughs to Brooklyn, I also switched libraries. I now do my writing - I am writing these words - at the Grand Army Plaza Branch, just 10 blocks from my home."
His brother Joshua works while sitting across from him. "In Brooklyn," Jonathan wrote, "people regularly carry on cellphone conversations at their desks, regularly sing along to the music they are listening to through their earphones (why wear earphones at all?), regularly have conversations (which are regularly about illicit things), regularly fall asleep...regularly prepare and eat meals, stare, hum, hoot, and get in scarily heated arguments with the roaming policemen about what's acceptable behavior. It's my best argument for why Brooklyn is the superior borough: it's real."
So was 9/11.
Christopher Hampton is a British novelist, screenwriter and translator. He wrote the 1988 screenplay adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons and the more recent screenplay adaptation for Ian McEwan's Atonement, both bringing him Academy Award nominations. He has also translated from French Yazmina Reza's plays, 'Art', which I had the pleasure of directing several years ago, Conversations After a Burial, and God of Carnage.
Hampton works from a beautiful London flat. He wrote: "We moved into the flat in 1971, so I've probably spent more of my life in this room than any other. I've had all kinds of arrangements, different tables, small reproduction desks in the window, but finally I commandeered, purely on account of its surface area, this very plain Habitat dining table and set my chair looking into the room so I wouldn't be distracted by what might be going on in the street." Whack! I shoulda had a V-8!
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe Jane Austen's Writing "Room"
Jane Austen described her writing as being done with a fine brush on a "little bit (not two inches wide) of ivory." She wrote on a surface not much larger than that. This delicate dozen-sided piece of walnut on a single tripod is likely the smallest table ever used by a writer. But not much bigger than the present-day laptop used by the literati in Starbucks.
On this picayune table were written the revised manuscripts of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, and then traveled to London to be published in 1811 and 1813. From this table arose the books Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion.
After a long period of inactivity, this is where she established herself as a writer. Her early unpublished novels had been written upstairs in her father's Hampshire rectory, and when the family moved to Bath in 1800, where writing became almost impossible for her. Only in 1809, when she returned to Hampshire and settled in the cottage on the Chawton estate of her brother Edward, could she devote herself to her work again.
It fascinates me where writers gravitate to create. That famous and successful writers work in attics and unadorned spaces in their homes and sheds says something about the family of wordsmiths. I think writers seek out an environment to write like no other decision for "location" in their lives. We want to live our lives in spaces that reflect our values, financial success, tastes and level of comfort. But as writers, we seek a location that doesn't reflect our personality so much as imbedding those spirits of creativity around us. How we manage that is a method of madness that is indescribably wonderful.
Very interesting and insightful piece, Tom. I have always had a great curiosity about famous writers, so this was quite appealing. And, I got some great visuals from your descriptions of some of your own choices of location for letting the creative juices flow!
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I thought about this piece while sitting in my car (again) writing. I thought, "How many writers sit in their car and write?" It started me thinking about where other writers write and led to finding out what you read. Thanks for stopping by, Marri.
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