“My friend Jack Carr wrote his first bestselling thriller in Starbucks and Peet’s and in alcoves at the public library. But he’s the exception. What made it work for him was his intention was so strong, and his passion and his commitment, that he brought a permanent space with him like his own personal hot spot.”
– Steven Pressfield, The Daily Pressfield
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“When I first started writing Norwegian Wood, I wrote at cafés in various places in Greece, on board ferry boats, in the waiting lobbies of airports, in shady spots in parks, and at desks in cheap hotels. Hauling around oversized, four-hundred-character-per-page Japanese manuscript paper was too much, so in Rome I bought a cheap notebook (the kind we used to call college-ruled notebooks) and wrote the novel down in tiny writing with a disposable Bic pen.
I still had to contend with noisy cafés, wobbly tables that made writing difficult, coffee spilling on the pages, and at night in my hotel room when I’d go over what I’d written, sometimes there would be couples getting all hot and heavy beyond the paper-thin walls separating my room from the room next door…
Wherever a person is when he writes a novel, it’s a closed room, a portable study. That’s what I’m trying to say.”
– Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation
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At school, we are forced to write in a formal setting, at a desk, in silence, wearing a uniform.
And we are expected to learn, understand and transform ideas into our own points of view.
But when we’ve moved beyond the formal educational setting, we have the freedom to change our environment.
We can we can write in a busy cafe, we could write in the dead of night. We can write wearing a t-shirt and shorts or a three piece suit if we like.
It’s inspiring to not think of writing as a formal activity: that we must proceed to sit down to create in only one place. Every environment becomes an environment for us to write in.
All the world’s a desk.
No special equipment is required. Words adapt.
Conversations With Quotations 