the where of it

where do you write?

• Posted by Summer Wood on August 21st, 2009 filed in seeds
• 2 Comments »

My middle kid (the fabulous banjo-pickin’, song writin’, lead singin’ KAN NAMBA of Two Ton Strap fame) sent me a link to a quirky little project by the photographer Kyle Cassidy. Where I write is a visual chronicle of the dedicated writing spaces of a host of science fiction and fantasy writers.  Here’s cult icon Samuel R. Delany in his lair:

It got me to thinking, where do I write? Is it anything like the book- and computer-strewn enclaves of these sci-fi wizards of the word?

Well… no.

It’s a timely moment to ask the question. I’m fresh off a (nearly) two year stint of support from A Room of Her Own Foundation. It was a blessed period that gave me the time and wherewithal to complete WRECKER, the novel I’ve been loving and laboring over since ARROYO first came out in 2001. Part of that wherewithal was, yes! A room of my own. Complete with bookshelves and file cabinets, and furnished with the infamous kelly green couch that’s been bearing the backsides of our family members since 1991 and of others since the thirties.

It was great to have my own room. It was a luxury that came to feel like a necessity. It was a place for me to store the notebooks and stack the piles that organize my thoughts, and it was a place for my computer to reside, a place to go when it was time to turn my scrawls into an electronic commitment to for-keeps.

But did I write there?

Sometimes I did. Lying on the couch, sitting at the desk, looking out the window.

But now that we’re in the process of moving (I call it a process because of the serious construction commitment that moving always seems to entail for us), and we’re living in two tiny rooms as I make slow headway on rendering the rest of the house habitable, I find that my old habits die hard. I write on the wing. It’s not so bad.

Here’s a partial list of some of the places I write:

- in the cab of my truck. Better if I’ve pulled over, but I’ve been known to scrawl thoughts while in transit. Something about driving – especially in these wide-open spaces of the west – opens the faucet for me.

- In the armchair. Legs akimbo.

- Out in the yard, where I can be profitably distracted by such wonders as mating dragonflies and the changing colors of the leaves on the neighbor’s pear tree.

- In bed. That’s my little secret. Writing drops me into a state of suspended animation alarmingly close to sleep, and sometimes a nap is the best way to dream my way into the next scene.

Yes, it’s on the books to build a tiny writing pod, a place to sit at my computer and store my papers and even lie down on a cot and catch a few z’s while waiting for the words to catch up with the characters. And I”ll be better organized and more efficient for it.

But I’ll bet you anything that having that space won’t stop me from writing in the less orthodox places I’ve found. Maybe it’s just that it takes some of the pressure off to write away from my desk. Maybe it’s just that I’m unwilling to give a place – my own room, my own desk – so much power that, in its absence, I’m unable to write.

How about you? Do you have a special place to write? Certain conditions that make it possible? What’s the view from your window?

Send me your responses and I’ll post the longer ones on a special page. You can email me at summerwood@thewhereofit.com.

Happy writing, wherever you are.