How To Make Space For Your Writing
Write 350 words using any of the following prompts:
1. Write about the campaign event of a national political figure from the perspective of that politician.
2. A spaceship lands at a daycare during recess and two aliens get out. Describe what happens next.
3. Write about the hardest thing you've done this year and why it was so difficult.
As always, feel free to share your writing with me. Just hit 'reply' in this email and send me what you wrote!
Just as you've gotta make time for your writing (and we covered that last week), you've got to make physical space for it as well. Unless you want to speech-to-text all your work into your phone in between appointments (which I would not recommend!) you're going to need a place where you can sit down and transfer the words in your head onto the screen or the page.
So, what makes for a great place to write?
Three attributes will do: convenient, comfortable, and quiet.
Everything else is detail.
Convenience over beauty
A ton of overwrought fiction has convinced many of us that we need to find some Instagram-worthy spot of great natural beauty to inspire great writing. The truth is a lot more mundane and pedestrian. What's actually important, above all else, is that your writing spot(s) be convenient and easy to get to.
We're all fundamentally lazy creatures. We prefer what's easy over what's hard. And why wouldn't we? Life is difficult enough without voluntarily picking the toughest option at any given time. So, when the time comes to write, are you more likely to fight traffic for 45 minutes to get to your romantic-as-hell-but-totally-impractical-and-picturesque park bench or plop down in your home office to bang out a few hundred words? My guess is the latter.
Creature comforts
Writing requires a ton of focus, and nothing kills focus quite like discomfort. In addition to being convenient, your writing spots should be comfortable as heck. You shouldn't have to worry that your chair is squeaky or that your desk wobbles or that your back hurts after 20 minutes of sitting in that position.
Barring physical ailments or injuries, you should be able to sit in the spots you've chosen for hours at a time with relative ease. Writing is a marathon, not a sprint. You've gotta be able to keep at it over the long haul for it to have a meaningful impact on your life.
A Quiet Place
Quiet, calm, and distraction-free. That's how I'd describe the places I've chosen to write from. See, when I first moved to Bermuda and started writing, I figured I'd get fancy and "write from the beach." Who hasn't had that fantasy? It's the ultimate "eff-you" to the rat race, right?
Well, in real life, writing from the beach sucks. The sun gets in your eyes and the sand gets in your keyboard. The local Bermudian kids make fun of you for working when you should be relaxing. And sunburn becomes a serious occupational hazard.
No, what you really want is a nice, quiet, and calm place. A home office with the door closed is perfect. A peaceful coffeeshop might do in a pinch. Any place you can sit down for half-an-hour at a time and just focus and write without dealing with screaming kids, loud traffic noise, or pounding music should suffice.
A few recommendations
Regardless of where you choose to write from, make sure that you can pick up a writing tool from there at a moment's notice. For example, I suggest that every writer have a notebook and a pen (or a tablet with a keyboard) on their bedside table. That way, if any ideas spring to mind or if inspiration strikes, you've got the necessary tools at hand.
For your main writing spot, if you have a home office, that's perfect. If you don't, any place kind of out of the hustle and bustle of your home should do. A basement den can work, as can a second bedroom with a desk in a pinch. As long as it's convenient, comfortable, and quiet, and contains all your writing equipment, it should work just fine.
Don't worry about whether you can take a Pinterest-style snap of the sunset from your new writing space. What's important is that you can sit down and write uninterrupted for at least 30 minutes.
Summing Up
Hopefully you've found a few of these tips to be somewhat useful. If you'd like to read more, check out some stories I've had published recently on Medium. Until next time!
