On Cynthia Newberry Martin’s blog, she’s been talking about writing rooms, and showing us photos of the beautiful room where she works. Today, she cited the famous Virginia Woolf quote:
“—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction…”
Then, in essence, she asked if where we write affects how we write. This question resonated with me, partly because I’ve been questioning why writing this novel is harder than the first one. For me, I believe there are two reasons, but I’ll blog about the other one tomorrow. Today I’m focusing on where we write.
I lived in Indiana when I wrote my first novel, and I wrote it while sitting in my bedroom beside a bay window looking into the woods. I wrote that novel in six months. Now, I live in the central valley of California. And though my home is on a street lined with shade trees, and I can hear the birds, I can also hear traffic and all the noise gardeners make in various neighbors’ yards each day of the week. My progress on this novel? It’s one year in, and I’m still not done.
In the first part of this novel, when I wrote about a fairly reclusive woman, with the majority of the action 
taking place in her home and garden, I had little problem, but the rest of the book is set almost exclusively in a coastal town, and it’s been much slower going. I have to work harder to get in the mood, to place my mind in the setting. It would be so much easier, if could see the ocean, smell the air, feel the breeze, hear the gulls outside my window as I wrote.
So, I think your surroundings do help in writing, if only to give you something beautiful to look at while you wait for the next words to come.
However, if we look at Woolf’s statement another way, she’s saying we have to give ourselves permission to write, to speak. We have to make room in ourselves for the writer within us. We have to make room in our minds and in our lives. And that, we can do anywhere.
I love the last paragraph of this post! I don’t even know what to say about this – it is so precise…And a little sad.
Why sad, Jennifer?
Denial of self.
Another thought that came to me about this post, (isn’t it neat that i am way over here and think about what you say?!?) was that in a first writing attempt, we are naive. We do not know the commitment that is required to write a novel, we do not know of the perseverance necessary to edit and re-write. We do not know of the frustration of trying to publish a finished work. It is bliss, just a writer, a story, and words. From my own personal experience nothing comes as easy the second time around… I always try to re-enter that mind frame when I write.
Shhhhhh! That’s my next post.
No, don’t say that!! Never even occurred to me (as I turn bright red)
LOL … we just seem to have some mental thing going on … well, you know what I mean. So … I guess you’ll agree with my next post. That is, unless you decide to play devil’s advocate.
Or, you could take a drive to the coast! It’s just a few hours away. Maybe stay a few days in a cheap motel.
I’m working on it. But cheap? On the coast?
Linda, this is a beautiful post. I love the tone of it and what it says about the connection between the place we write and the place we’re writing about.
And I agree with Jennifer–I love the last paragraph.
Also the pictures.
I’ll be checking back to see what the second reason is…
Thank you for striking the spark that illuminated my thoughts. To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor: Sometimes I don’t know what I think, until I read what others write.
I’m still hung up on the quote. A woman must have money…
Oh, dear. How much? I seem to be lacking in large sums, but I do have the place to write. I’m halfway there.
But doesn’t she mean someone has to pay the bills? If someone else works, while you write, you have no worry about money.
I find that I have to change up my location occasionally or else I find myself in a rut. A few writing sessions at a DD or Starbucks usually solves the problem.
You don’t get distracted by the activity around you? I think I need more quiet. Although … maybe if there was too much activity around me, I’d retreat inside myself and write better. Hmmm, better try it out. Someplace that doesn’t smell like coffee though.
Nope. If I’m just journaling free-style I may weave it in to what I’m doing and just let my mind go and riff on whatever it flows to. Other times if I’m writing specifically about something in my novel, for example, then I can block out the environment pretty well, at least for a short period of time.
Usually I buy a coffee there and drink it while I work.
Where I write has minimal impact because my best writing happens when I disappear inside my imagination, and that can happen at a coffee shop, at 4am or even @the office (after hours when there are no interruptions).
Most of the obstacles I face are right inside that same space – my head.
Haha, I can totally relate to that!
Cathryn and Frank, yes, I can and have to do this on occasion, but for me, it’s just so much harder to go inside in a public place.