“Where Writers Write”

Nice catch here: A feature in “Poets & Writers” about where writers write:

Conrad Aiken worked at a refectory table in the dining room; Robert Graves wrote in a room furnished only with objects made by hand. Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up; D. H. Lawrence under a tree. William Maxwell preferred “small messy rooms that don’t look out on anything interesting.” Katherine Anne Porter said she got her writing done in the country, where she lived like a hermit. Ben Franklin wrote in the bathtub, Jane Austen amid family life, Marcel Proust in the confines of his bed. Balzac ate an enormous meal at five in the evening, slept till midnight, then got up and wrote at a small desk in his room for sixteen hours straight, fueled by endless cups of coffee. Toni Morrison found refuge in a motel room when her children were small; E. B. White sought it in a cabin on the shore. Due to her problem back, Penelope Lively works in an armchair, with an “ancient electronic typewriter” on her lap, while A. L. Kennedy finds comfort in a “monster black chair” in a room “the color of blood.” 

“For years, I couldn’t write anywhere except at my cabin and my house and then my office in the granary, but two years ago I got liberated and wrote a novella in a motel in Montana,” Jim Harrison told Nancy Bunge in an interview that appears in her collection Master Class: Lessons From Leading Writers (University of Iowa Press, 2005). “I felt splendid because then I wasn’t locked into those places.” How extraordinary that statement sounded to me when I first read it. Extraordinary because I, too, feel the necessity to write in a specific place, but also because I am constantly looking for a new place, for the place where I believe I will be able to work best.

How about you? Is there the place where you can write best?

And here’s something we’ve discussed before on GITS:

Why do some writers prefer company and background noise, while others need isolation? Why do some need the magical monotony of sameness, and others the inspiration of variety? What does it mean for a writer to be locked into a place? What does place even mean to a writer?

You can access the book referenced in the article — Master Class: Lessons From Leading Writers — here.

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