Where Authors Do Their Thing
This blog entry is a little different. I’m writing it at thirty three thousand feet, and I’m drunk.
I don’t fly well and, for medical reasons, cannot board planes sober (many people have told me you’re more likely to perish crossing the road or juggling bees than in an air accident - it doesn’t help, but WHATEVER - and yet, the way I see it, it’s hardly an accident if you’re arsing through the sky strapped to two engines; what you’re actually doing is asking for bloody trouble). Anyway, why am I on a plane? I’m travelling back to the UK without the fam in the hope of spending the next 10 days pulling all nighters and getting some solid editing done, and this whole foolhardy mission has put me in mind of writing spaces.
Authors are sentimental and superstitious fools who often have that particular place in mind where they just *have* to write, a location that gets creative juices flowing far from the madding crowd (we all know the cautionary tale about Coleridge’s interrupted session while writing Kubla Kahn; keep other humanoids the hell away from you is rule one). Dickens had a desk that followed him around the country, Virginia Woolf wrote in her basement, Roald Dahl in his shed, Agatha Christie in the bath, etc.
All of the above writing locations are true, by the way.
I have long treasured my four volumes of The Paris Review Interviews, essential reading if you want to know how others manage it, and in Hemingway’s 1958 interview it was revealed that the madman actually wrote standing up.
‘A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading-board chest-high opposite him.’
I had to Google ‘lesser kudu’ to discover that it’s a type of antelope, probably something Ernest proudly hunted himself, the arsehole. Anyway, this thing about him standing up when he wrote may or may not have been true. We all lie a little in our interviews, don't we darling?
A few years ago, I put the ire in Ireland when Peggie from Munster took offence to a box-out within my article promoting The Art Teacher in Writing Magazine:
Poor Peggie's irked response was hilarious:
‘I have been a subscriber for many years and especially enjoy other writers’ descriptions of where they write. ‘I write in the far corner of our manse,’ says Marshall Taylor in the January 2017 issue, while Martin Edwards writes in the June 2016 issue that he lives in a house with a ‘beautiful view over Lymm Dam, a lake in Cheshire’, and to cap it all Paul Read (October 2016) wrote that his favourite writing place is ‘the grounds of Villa Avellino in Pozzuoli, a district just outside Naples.’ That last writing place strikes a chord with me on this cold, grey morning. I write in the spare bedroom of my little apartment. I have a view of tumbledown warehouses, home of stray cats, and sadly soon to be demolished.’
I feel I should come clean, having upset a Munster resident almost four years ago about to go through the traumatic experience of watching stray cats being demolished from her bedroom window. Yes, the gardens were a favourite of mine but I probably wrote for no more than an hour a week there, prior to a private lesson in Pozzuoli. Much of my writing then, as now, actually took place at a dining table, though I have swapped the view this year for one of the Sussex coast (sadly, the window next to my dining table has a broken seal, currently rendering the view blurred and water-stained).
Up until this flight (we just hit turbulence over the Alps - my absolute favourite part of the EasyJet experience), I’d managed to edit four chapters in the following location (you're going to hate this, Peggie):
This is Lago, just outside the fishing village of Santa Maria di Castellebate. In the past, I’ve always considered this venue my own personal Goldeneye (the Jamaican holiday retreat Ian Fleming visited annually to write his unfathomably popular James Bond novels). Most summers are very productive. Two thousand words a day tumble from my fingertips as the view blows through and, last year, I wrote the first third of the novel I'm now editing here - a summery burst of creativity while my kids were swimming on the nearby beach.
Alas, it seems editing in such a location is a different beast. This year, the air was missing, the sweat could be sluiced off with a spade and the sun was a supernova.
So here I am on a plane, heading back to the window with a broken seal. And before you tell me how lucky I am to have a few days to myself, I’ll leave you with the bare truth of the matter:
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