Creating A Writing Habitat
When I was eight, we moved to new house. Well, not exactly new, but new to me, new to us. I hadn't wanted to move: our old house had had a balcony off the children's bedroom which I had loved. I used to sneak out on to it in the afternoon and watch the clouds take animal shapes, and at night when everyone was asleep I would lean on the railing, talking to the stars and aliens. Standing on the balcony, I'd wave my aluminum foil flags and borrowed refrigerator magnets, hoping to be beamed up.
But the new house had something special: three separate bedrooms for the children. Although mine was sullen and subdued, it looked out on a romantic Japanese garden, complete with an almond tree. It was a shady room, a dark room. The morning light barely visited and the afternoon sun sometimes not at all. But it belonged to me, and I loved it for that alone.
Almond Tree, Van Gogh. via Creative Commons.
What I remember most about that room was its color. My mother had promised that I could pick out the color of paint, and I had deliberated for days, finally deciding on a pale mint green. Cool, the color of sherbet, summer, cotton candy. To me, it wasn't a room with green walls. It was instead a meadow, a field of flowers, a bed of moss.
The room began with a single bed and a bulletin board, but within a year, it had become just like a little house. There was a "living room", with the bed turned into a couch and a coffee table made of crates, displaying magazines and a candy dish. A small corner transformed into a "dressing room", with the help of a folding screen. The "library" had a little bookcase, a card table with pencils, paper, and paperweights, the heavy glass kind with butterflies inside. I wanted to lock the door and live in that room, leaving for school via my window. I still sigh with delight when I think about it even now.
We argued with each other every day, that little green room and I. I was always rearranging, moving, shifting. Small displays of leaves, bugs in jars, bouquets of stolen flowers, origami boxes, thrift store buttons and rickrack, old photographs, poems.. these were all judiciously arranged. Carefully edited collections of all things dead and living, past and present, real and fantasy. The room changed weekly, sometimes daily, each table adjusted until it met some imaginary requirement known only to me. In the end, the room acquiesced, giving up its surfaces and walls to me and my butterflies, seashells, rocks, and beach glass.
Yet I was not a hoarder. I was a collector, and a choosy one. From a young age, my specific taste in objects meant that I spent hours looking for the "right" sort of things. Texture. Color. Shape. These elements were my guides, and when people thrust ugly Barbie pink things at me, or insisted that the color of the candy in my candy dish didn't matter, I took offense. When relatives kindly gave me gifts at Christmas, I eyed them critically: would they fit in or not? For at age eight or nine, I already knew: such things do make a difference. They could feel pleasing or chaotic--and chaos was something I already had enough of in family environs.
Perhaps that is why I did have such strong feelings about how things should look, feel, and be experienced: I didn't have that much control in other areas of my young life. On the other hand, maybe I just knew what looked good.
An inventive and resourceful child, I spent my days waiting for night. At night, everyone went to sleep, and I would finally be alone in my green room. Once the house was still and quiet, I would cautiously and quietly go to the kitchen to heat a pot of water to make "tea": hot water and lots of honey or sugar. Pouring it into a flowered teapot, I would carry it back to my room and set it on my little coffee table. Tea-things would be set out: little dry crackers, bits of candy, whatever I could get. The tea would be poured, the reading light moved just a little, and I would settle down for hours of reading before anyone woke up.
Sometimes I would push a chair up against my door, just under the doorknob. I was never afraid I was going be discovered, awake at three in the morning--it was more the idea of being alone that I relished. That silence, that glorious silence of nothingness that comes only when the world is at rest. Even when I think about it now, I feel happy remembering that warm contentment that comes with real solitude, the taste of warm sugar-water, the crisp stale smell of the pages of an old book.
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I'm still a person who thrives on that deep, rich quiet that comes only when all the televisions in my part of the world are off, when cell phones have stopped ringing, when people don't expect interesting conversation or polite small talk. Quiet that doesn't start until that magical time: three o'clock in the morning.
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It's the wee hours of the morning now. I'm sitting at my desk, the cat at my feet, my boyfriend asleep in our bed. I feel a bit like that sneaky child, who listened in the darkness for the sounds of sleep. But things are different now: I live next to a freeway, and there is no real silence here--not the silence of my childhood. Instead there is the sound of cars whizzing by on the road at all hours of the night, an endless procession of busyness, half drowned out by my white noise machine. Yet this is my quiet, as quiet as my hectic life is capable of being.
Other than the noise, the other major difference is that I have no door to prop up a chair against, no way to protect my solitude as I did when I was that young girl. Now my desk sits in the living room, exposed and open, vulnerable and unguarded. In our tiny apartment, there is no perfect ideal place to write: it's all shared space.
When I decided to follow my calling to write-to really be a writer, not just talk about it, but devote myself to it--I hadn't realized the depth to which the task would take me. I thought I could fit in writing in the odd available moments--my break at work, when dinner was almost ready, those few minutes before bed. And I have managed to fit writing into those moments. But in all honesty, it is not enough. The more I write, the more I need to write. The more I write, the more I think about writing. The more I write, the more I long for that solitude of my youth. Silence that was sustaining, creating, satisfying. A renewed quest for something that was lost long ago, but that I hope to find again.
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Perhaps the most annoying thing anyone can tell a writer is this: that if you really want to write, you can write where ever you happen to be. That may be true if you are in the Himalayas, writing the story of your ascent with gloved hands by flashlight, but it's not true if you are at home. Home is a different sort of place altogether, full of objects and people and impressions that may or not help you to write. Of course one can write marvelous stories while traveling, and one should. But once again, it's when one returns home that those stories flesh out and gain more meaning.
The second most annoying thing anyone can tell a writer is how writer-so-and-so wrote their novel while standing at a coffee shop and now it's a bestseller; therefore, it's entirely logical that you, too, should be able to write your novel in a very public place like Starbucks. And don't bring up the Harry Potter author: yes, she did write her book at coffee shop! But her table was by a window with a view of a castle, and the cafe was terribly charming, too:
The first Harry Potter book was written here: a terribly charming café. Hardly Starbucks, with its view of a parking lot.
Starbucks and the like: not the sort of place where you write until you are in the "zone": the kind of writing where you forget what time it is, forget to eat, forget to brush your hair. When I've written on my laptop perched on a chair at Starbucks, I go home, look at what I wrote and it's never really good. It's always more of an outline than an actual story. But such places are fine to sit and write a little; meet other people and tell them you are writing; and then go home feeling very good about your public-writer-identity.
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Which gets me to my point: nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to the writing one can write at home. And this brings me to my second point: while writing at home, one must be alone.
There must be writers somewhere who manage to write with other people milling about, the radio on in the background, the phone ringing, the television babbling--but I've never met one. I've met writers who were parents and so were forced to incorporate child-rearing into their writing routine, but they still longed for solitude. When I lived in Calcutta--one of the most crowded places on Earth, every house brimming over with extended family, a society dependent on everyone being highly social creatures--why even then, the Bengali writers I knew went into a room and closed a door to write.
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This brings me to my personal crux: what do you do if you haven't got a door to close?
Some people have advised we get a bigger apartment. I suppose this is realistic and does solve the door problem. On the other hand, a bigger apartment costs more money, which means less time to write and more time spent earning to pay for the extra space. And consider this: do we all need to live in spaces with multiple bedrooms and enormous floor plans? I don't think we do. In fact, we should all consider living with less. Apartment living--even a tiny one bedroom--is a smaller thumbprint, and that's important.
Instead I have found myself reflecting back on that girl with the mint green bedroom. The feeling that I want when I write is that same feeling that she had at three in the morning, drinking her hot pretend tea and reading Jane Erye. Her habitat, retreat, home. That old green room has given me a lot of inspiration: it wasn't simply the door that made the space private, it was the atmosphere of place.
What I've decided to do is divide the living room with walls. Not just any walls, but specially designed ones that I build myself. Walls are so important, aren't they? I've been pretending I had walls around my writing desk for months now and I'll tell you this: pretending doesn't work. Instead of pretending, I'll have two walls that are almost like big, padded rectangles on wheels: they will be moveable, but look permanent. Each wall will go from floor to ceiling and be filled with insulation as an added noise barrier to household noise. My writing area will be on one side, blocked from view, while the living room will be on the other. Perfect. We'll paint the living room side with chalkboard paint. Why not? For love notes and grocery lists...
I've chosen the side of the living room with the most natural light for my writing room: it looks out on a tiny balcony and faces the din of the freeway, which is so constant it almost a comfort. But the balcony is pleasant for a little garden, and the sun streams in and warms that side of the room every morning.
The next thing I must do is to pay attention to what details make me feel like writing. What keeps me in my writing chair and what makes it excruciating to stay put? What objects could I use to make the writing habitat a creatively charged space?
The writing habitat will not be limited to the designated writing area--it will extend into the whole apartment, each area carefully curated, each vignette a signature of a story. Shared space will serve it's function too, a respite from our creative work (and our day jobs)!
I'm so looking forward to creating this new space within a space, and hope to share the final results here when it is finished.
For me, creating this writing space officially launches me into the world of being committed to writing. Setting aside an area that is not merely some grim afterthought, but an almost living breathing environment devoted to the craft is going to change what has center stage in my life. It means I'm preparing for the eventuality that writing, in some form or another, will be my livelihood.
If you have writing habitat, a corner you write in, a room with a door(or without!)..I'd love to hear about it. I'm especially interested in what objects you decorated it with, what inspires you, what draws you to that chair and keeps you there.
Amy Gigi Alexander
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